


A Case of You

by daphnaea



Series: The Unbroken Cup [2]
Category: The Mentalist
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Case Fic, F/M, Post Red John, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:07:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 30,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24457942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daphnaea/pseuds/daphnaea
Summary: When she'd been debating whether or not to get involved with him, she'd imagined that, given his personal history, he would be the paranoid one, cooking up elaborate schemes to keep her out of the line of fire. It had never occurred to her that she might be the one losing her mind instead.
Relationships: Patrick Jane/Teresa Lisbon
Series: The Unbroken Cup [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1766521
Comments: 14
Kudos: 70





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel to my story "A Game of Truth" and I recommend reading that one first. The title is borrowed from the lovely Joni Mitchell song.

Part 1:

As Agent Lisbon knocked on the surveillance van's door, she spared a moment to pray that tonight would be the night they finally broke the case, and this stupid ordeal would be over. She was twenty minutes early for her 10 PM shift, and she clutched an oversized travel mug full of the strongest coffee she could brew.

Agent Snyder slid the door open and Lisbon climbed in, her eyes automatically scanning the bank of monitors on the opposite wall of the van, frowning when she couldn't find Jane anywhere.

"He's in the bathroom," Snyder told her, a knowing smirk in the other agent's voice.

Lisbon was well aware that the majority of the FBI's Sacramento Field Office had assumed she and Jane were sleeping together from the time their team joined up as acting agents in the aftermath of the Red John case. She'd once overheard Snyder speculating about her use of some rather intimate disciplinary measures to another agent in the lady's room. She'd just flushed her toilet and emerged from the stall with a serenely implacable smile on her face, washed her hands, met each of the other agents' eyes in turn, and left without a word. She'd learned over their years at the CBI that dignifying such remarks with even the most contemptuous replies only fed the gossip mill. And she'd long since given up being bothered by what people said about them. It was just one more brick in the wall of law-enforcement-typical misogyny.

But that had been before there was any truth to the rumors. Now, two weeks into an undefined but definitely non-platonic relationship with her wayward consultant, ten days of which he'd spent undercover in the mental institution across the street from the surveillance van, she wanted to slap that smug, insinuating look right off Snyder's face.

She didn't, of course. She just asked for an update on the developments of the day in her most flatly professional voice, flipping through the written logs as Snyder gave her the highlights. Of which there were few. She could only hope that Jane had something useful to tell her when he checked in later.

Snyder clocked out at 9:55. By 10 PM, Jane was back in his room as required by the ward schedule. The lights shut off at 10:10, and at 10:15 Jane had fished the radio disguised as an MP3 player out from his mattress and had the earphones in, ready to go. The FBI really did have cooler toys.

"Jane?" she said into her own headset.

"I hear you, Lisbon," he said, his voice a little rough.

"How are you doing?" she asked.

"Fine. But I miss sleeping in my own bed." Which was to say, he missed sleeping in _their_ bed. This was as close to personal as he could get when every word they spoke was being recorded by the FBI as potential evidence.

"Well, I'd rather be home in _my_ bed than spending the night in a van," she replied. "So can you tell me anything that'll get both of us out of here?"

It was an ugly case. Murders in a locked ward, suicidal patients who seemed to kill themselves - until a suspicious ME had looked a little harder at the latest victim's corpse. Even now, it was impossible to tell how many previous deaths were really murder - though there was enough evidence that a serial killer was at work to get the FBI involved. But with so much uncertainty about the scope of the crimes and so little evidence to work with, it was agreed that the best tactic was to plant a potential target inside the facility to lure the murderer into making a move. Rigsby had been placed as an orderly, Van Pelt as a physician's assistant - and Jane was the bait. He played the part of Patrick Russell, a suicidally depressed widower, with a degree of verisimilitude that Lisbon found deeply disturbing. He checked in once a day, after lights out, and every night she heard the increasing toll the charade was taking on him. It wasn't fair, she thought. The two of them should be reveling in their new closeness, stealing every moment they could together, and instead she got to watch him on video screens reliving the darkest chapter of his life.

Since he'd walked in those doors, he'd looked like a man who hadn't smiled in so long he'd forgotten how. His face was lined with despair, his demeanor listless and withdrawn, as if he'd retreated to some dark place beyond the reach of his fellow creatures. This bleak lethargy was punctuated only by moments of haunted anguish when his face twisted with unbearable pain.

It was a very convincing act. Except Lisbon was entirely aware that in another way, it wasn't an act at all, but a journey back to somewhere he'd been all too often before.

He cleared his throat. "I still think the Care Coordinator and Nurse Edward are the most likely suspects. Do you have any new background on them?"

"The Care Coordinator's father committed suicide when she was sixteen. Nurse Edward had a close friend - his college roommate - who killed himself in his early twenties."

"Do you know any more details?" he asked. "Did the suicides come after a lengthy struggle with mental illness, or were they triggered by some concrete event?"

"I don't have that yet. We'll dig into it tomorrow. Anything else I should know?"

On the screen, she saw Jane glance up at where the camera was hidden, and then away again. "In group today, I said I'd tried to hang myself but a friend found me and saved my life. I said I wished he hadn't - that a true friend would have understood and let me end my suffering." An odd expression crossed his face. "I thought if someone tried strangulation in here, I might have a better chance of fighting them off than some other methods."

"Good choice," she said wryly, trying to keep her voice steady. She knew, now, that when he really had tried to kill himself, before they met, it had been with pain pills and alcohol. She almost wished he'd never told her that, because now she kept picturing it, his slackly unconscious face beside a pool of vomit in that beautiful mausoleum of a house. But she couldn't let him know how much the case - or rather, his role in the case - was getting to her, or he'd do something reckless and foolhardy to bring it all to a head and get himself nearly killed in the process. And she wouldn't be there to save him.

She didn't know what was wrong with her. He'd been in life-threatening situations dozens of times over the years, and it had never gotten to her like this. She'd worried over him before, lost sleep over him, imagined herself at his funeral more times than she cared to admit, but it had never made her feel this out of control. Of course, all those other times had been before he told her he was hers.

When she'd been debating whether or not to get involved with him, she'd imagined that, given his personal history, he would be the paranoid one, cooking up elaborate schemes to keep her out of the line of fire. It had never occurred to her that she might be the one losing her mind when, objectively, this situation was much safer and better controlled than most of the others he'd embroiled himself in over the years.

She was careful not to let her concerns color her voice as they went over the rest of the day's updates for each other. Their conversations were succinct and business-like, but they helped. She thought if she hadn't been able to hear his voice once a day, she'd be climbing the walls.

After they signed off, he slept or pretended to, and she watched the surveillance feeds as the staff closed up shop for the night. Once it had quieted down, she began to review videos from earlier in the day, tracking their chief suspects as well as Jane himself, looking for any salient details the rest of the surveillance team had missed. She jotted down a few moments that could be construed as suspicious, though there was nothing that narrowed down the pool of possible murderers. It could have been anyone who'd been with the facility long-term and had access to both information about the patients and their living quarters, which yielded a surprisingly long list, from nurses and doctors to janitorial staff. Jane had at one point suggested it could even be a long-term patient, though thus far no evidence had pointed in that direction.

In the morning, Cho checked in to replace Lisbon in the van, and she drove to the FBI building to review the progress their analyst had made in researching the backgrounds of their suspects and possible victims, and trying to determine whether anyone had improperly accessed electronic patient files. The case was slowly coming together, but there was nothing incriminating yet. There might not be until the murderer made another move, but she didn't want to accept that, so she spent another hour putting together her next set of instructions for the analyst they'd been assigned.

It was all so frustrating. The undercover op hinged on the fact that almost no one at the mental hospital knew the murders had been detected, which hamstrung the rest of the team. The second they tried to run a traditional investigation, bringing the suspects in for interrogations and trying to break their alibis, they ran the very real risk that their murderer would disappear, only to surface in some other facility and start killing all over again. It felt like they were getting nowhere.

Once Lisbon ran out of plausibly productive tasks, she headed home to get some rest before her night shift started. Her apartment felt empty and wrong. Jane had been staying with her for months, since shortly after McAllister's death, though they'd only recently made the arrangement official. She hadn't had any idea just how accustomed she'd grown to his presence until he was gone. Even though this was the same apartment she'd lived in alone perfectly happily for years and years, that sense of comfort and belonging had disappeared.

She took off her badge and gun and jacket, dropped her bag on the couch, toed off her shoes, and made her way back to their bedroom, thinking that maybe changing clothes would help her relax. She was foggy with exhaustion, her sleep lately fractured and plagued by nightmares, and when she swung the door open some trick of the mounded blankets on the unmade bed and an arc of shadow on the wall over the headboard suggested the ultimate horror: Jane's body lying under a bloody smile.

Her legs gave out and before she knew it she was cowering on the floor, arms over her head to block out a sight her rational mind told her was impossible. For that second it was real, though, and it felt like her ribcage had been torn open. Her throat was so tight she couldn't pull in air, but with iron will she made herself open her eyes and take in the scene. No blood, no corpse, just the same empty room she'd left the evening before.

It dawned on her, then, exactly how little she'd ever understood about Jane's grief. She had seen it in him, sympathized with him, hurt for him, but she'd lacked any frame of reference for what it actually felt like. She'd mourned her mother as a child, Bosco as a friend, her father less than she felt she should have, but she'd never lost her whole heart. She still couldn't grasp it, really, but she could come close enough now to imagine the scope of that devastation.

If Jane had actually lain murdered in their bed, in the place he'd held her in his arms and whispered words of love, she'd never be able to set foot in that room again. She'd burn down the whole apartment complex first.

But for Jane of course it hadn't just been grief, it had been guilt as well, and he had punished himself for years in the desecrated sanctuary of his marriage. It really wasn't surprising that he'd tried to kill himself, she reflected. The surprise was that he'd only done it once.

Her stomach gurgled, and she shook her head to clear it and changed into pajamas before microwaving some leftover pizza. Jane's absence had impacted her diet as well as her peace of mind.

She crashed out on the couch after eating, with the TV on to break up the silence, and after a few hours of sleep she got up and went through the whole routine again: the surveillance van, the check-in with Jane, a night watching video feeds, a morning at the office chasing down cold trails that never led anywhere, then back to her empty apartment with a fast food burger and fries paired with a shot of whiskey to steady her nerves.

She slept on the couch again, sliding in and out of consciousness, blind with exhaustion, her body unmoored from the cycles of the days, until she fell into a familiar nightmare. She couldn't remember the first time she'd had it, and it was never the same twice. She was always with Jane somewhere, at work, in the field - tonight they were at home together, eating dinner. Everything was normal for a while. Then Jane wiped his mouth with a napkin, but instead of smearing the sauce on his lip, it smeared his face instead. She reached out to him and his whole face fell off into her hands. Sometimes there was black emptiness inside his head, or clockwork gears, or another face, blank and reptilian. This time, it was bare muscles and blood - the inside of an actual human being.

Lisbon woke with a start, sweaty and tangled in the throw blanket. The dreams had always been painfully obvious even to her: that she feared everything she saw in Jane was just a hollow shell covering something far worse. There had been whole years when she suspected every single interaction they had was a manipulation or a series of behavioral experiments for his private amusement, that every piece of himself he showed her was a ploy at best and a lie at worst. She suspected she'd never have been able to tolerate him if she hadn't met him before he put the mask back together, and thus known that underneath the tricks he wasn't malicious: he was just lost.

Of course even when he'd been at his most calculatingly invasive, she'd never exactly wanted him to leave her alone. As much as she'd hated having her barriers breached, it had been flattering as well, the intensity of his interest. He'd played with the rest of the team, but he hadn't _studied_ them. She'd known he was searching for something, perhaps without even being aware of it himself, and if he was trying to find it by unraveling her… well, she didn't have to make it easy for him, but she wasn't going to stop him from trying.

And the dream today? Clearly she was afraid that under the charming smiles, he was still nothing but pain. There had been times, in the past week, when she'd watched video of his vacant hopelessness and wondered if that was still the truth of him. If his claims that she made him happy, that he was finally moving on, were more wish than anything else, and he was just trying to fake his way through a relationship with her because he didn't know what else to do now that his old reason for living had died with McAllister. Or because it was what he thought she wanted, and she was the one who'd helped him execute his revenge. Or if being with her had proved an immediate let down once the thrill of the chase was gone.

It had all felt very genuine at the time. He'd seemed happier than she'd ever seen him before. When he declared his love, she'd believed him, and after a brief hesitation she'd allowed herself to be swept along by his certainty. But Jane could play any role for a week. Besotted suitor was well within his range.

And even if it had been real, it didn't mean his grief had receded so very much at all, that his affection for her wasn't a small boat floating on a deep sea of anguish. And that was all right. She hadn't taken him on because he was easy. But she hated this feeling of disorientation, not knowing which way was up.

It felt like he was disappearing right in front of her. She thought of all the times he'd left her: at a dozen crime scenes, at the beach on the way to Malibu - this wasn't even the first time a fake breakdown had been involved, though in most respects this was the opposite of his sojourn in Vegas. Then, she hadn't known where he was or how to reach him. Now, she could observe him every hour of the day, but what did that matter if she couldn't tell the act from the truth, if every night he slipped further away?

When he'd promised not to leave her again two weeks ago, they'd only been talking about his physical location. It hadn't occurred to her that he could vanish without going anywhere at all. And she couldn't even blame him - he'd done nothing but faithfully execute the plan she helped design.

She hadn't made much progress in untangling her feelings for him yet - hadn't even tried hard, if she was being honest, but she'd become very clear on two points: she wanted him to be happy, and she wanted him to be with her. Right now he was neither of those things, and she had the sinking feeling it was all her fault. She was the one who was supposed to take care of him, to steer him away from the edge. But she'd failed him this time. She hadn't understood what going undercover would mean for him. She'd thought it would be just another mask he could put on and take off without changing what was underneath.

She knew now that she'd been wrong. She'd merrily sent him off to tear himself into pieces for this stupid, awful case. She just hoped that when it was over, he'd let her help him put himself back together again.

Lisbon decided she was irrevocably awake and shuffled to the kitchen to eat a granola bar and brew a pot of coffee. Maybe a shower would restore her to some semblance of humanity.

Despite feeling like she was moving at half speed, she arrived at the surveillance van ahead of her shift.

When Snyder opened the door, she was holding a bag of potato chips in her other hand. "Want any?" she asked, jiggling the packet in Lisbon's direction.

Lisbon glanced at it briefly before her gaze flicked to the monitors and she forgot all about snack foods. "What's wrong with Jane?" she demanded. The man was sprawled out on his bed, fully dressed but apparently unconscious, his disguised radio dangling from one hand. With a feeling of abject relief, she saw his chest rise and fall.

Snyder shrugged, unconcerned. "He seemed really tired. He went to bed early."

She bit back a retort. "Show me what happened before this."

Snyder fiddled with the controls for a moment, then queued up the scene on another display. Jane was in the patients' common area, making desultory conversation with the woman from room 19, when he began to sway slightly in his seat. He shook his head as if to clear it, then stood up and headed for the exit, looking increasingly unsteady as he went. By the time he got to the hall, he had a hand against the wall for balance.

"He's obviously been drugged," she said.

Snyder made some sort of pitiful excuse for her gross incompetence, but that wasn't important. Lisbon had already dialed Van Pelt, who would be nearest to hand, and explained the situation.

Then she called Rigsby, telling him to get into position across the hall from Jane's room, and Cho, telling him to quietly bring in some backup in case the murderer made a break for it and an ambulance in case Jane turned out to be less sedated and more poisoned.

The surveillance feeds showed no one out of place, and Lisbon watched in an agony of impatience as Grace got off the elevator, chatted briefly with the woman on night-duty at the nurse's station, and made her way back to Jane's room.

Finally she was there, bending over him to check his heartbeat and breathing. "His pulse and respiration are elevated but not distressed," she reported over her headset. She continued her exam. "He's unresponsive. Body a bit rigid. No obvious signs of overdose or poisoning. I'm going to see if I can rouse him."

On the screen, Lisbon watched Grace shake and then slap Jane, who flinched and groaned but did not regain consciousness. "He's really out," she reported redundantly. "What do you want me to do?"

A brief but vicious war raged within Lisbon. "Stay in the room, out of sight. We wait for the killer to make a move. Unless Jane gets worse. If he needs medical help, we get it for him."

"Got it, boss." Van Pelt moved the easy chair into the least visible corner of the room and crouched behind it as the lights switched off for the night.

"I'm in position," Rigsby reported.

"Snyder," Lisbon snapped, "look back over the evening's feeds and see if you can tell who drugged Jane. It was probably within half an hour of when he went back to his room."

She didn't really trust Snyder to do the job right, but there was no way she was taking her eyes away from the live feed to do it herself.

And then they waited. The murderer would want to strike once the ward was as quiet as possible, but before Jane regained consciousness.

After fifteen minutes, she had Van Pelt check Jane's vitals again. If he died while they were all sitting there watching, she'd end up in a padded room herself.

She demanded an update from Snyder. "I'm not sure," was all she got. "I don't see anything off about his evening meds, but someone could have switched his placebos out earlier. And then he's in the rec room drinking tea, but the angle's bad and a lot of people are nearby - plenty of opportunity for someone to drug the cup but I can't see it happen."

"Go frame by frame," Lisbon told her shortly. "Make a list of everyone who gets close enough to do it."

Finally, after the better part of an hour, there was motion in the stairwell. "Heads up, team," she said into her headset. "Nurse Edward's moving towards Jane's room."

She heard Van Pelt cock her weapon. The nurse walked briskly down the hall, glanced around for observers, unlocked Jane's door, and slipped inside. This was the trickiest part. They needed to wait long enough to have the suspect dead to rights for attempted murder, but not long enough to run too much risk of it turning into actual murder.

As Edward stripped the top sheet off of Jane's bed and fashioned it into a noose, Lisbon spared a moment to appreciate Jane's foresight. The timing would be even harder if he'd threatened to slit his wrists. If he'd said he'd OD, he might have already been dead by the time she got to the van and realized something was wrong.

Van Pelt made her move the second Edward slipped the knotted sheet over Jane's head. "Federal Agent! Put your hands up or I _will_ shoot!"

"Rigsby, get in there!" Lisbon shouted. "Cho, get a medic up to Jane!"

Nurse Edward was babbling about how he was saving Patrick really, but Lisbon couldn't bring herself to pay attention. The only thing that mattered was that he'd surrendered without a fight, and Rigsby was bursting into the room and getting the noose off Jane while Van Pelt slapped on the handcuffs. "Get him to tell you what he dosed Jane with the second he's Mirandized," she instructed, before telling Snyder to keep an eye on the monitors on the off chance that Edward had an accomplice who might try sneaking away. Then she abandoned the van to run across the street and into the building, needing to be there already, to touch Jane and assure herself that he'd be all right.

The trip was a blur of staircases and fluorescent lighting. By the time she got there, Jane's room was full to bursting. Nurse Edward had confessed to drugging his tea, and Lisbon told Van Pelt to get Edward out of there and take lead on the interrogation once he was booked. She sent Cho along to back her up and start putting together statements, while Rigsby stayed onsite to liaise with the facility's management and collect physical evidence.

And then finally, finally she turned her attention to Jane, and the EMT who was wrapping up her assessment. "His condition is consistent with a high oral dose of ketamine, as the suspect indicated," she told Lisbon. "He should wake up in another hour or so, but he'll be groggy and tired for the next day. The only real danger now is nausea - if he aspirates vomit he could asphyxiate without waking up. So don't leave him unsupervised or let him lie on his back. We can bring him to the hospital for observation, but off the record there's nothing we can do to ease his recovery besides keeping an eye on him. He may be having hallucinations, or even a death-like experience. If he knew he was drugged by a murderer, my guess is he's not having a very nice trip. He may be upset and disoriented when he wakes up."

Lisbon nodded. She could all too easily imagine the nightmares he might be conjuring up for himself. But it could have been so much worse. "Any damage from the attempted strangulation?"

"He may have some soreness and bruising, but nothing worse than that."

She let out a breath. "All right. I don't think he'd want to go to the hospital. If it's safe, I'll take him home and keep an eye on him."

After that, everything happened quickly. They took a blood sample from Jane for evidence, after which she commandeered a couple of spare LEOs to help her get him back to her - their - apartment.

And then, finally, there was nothing to do but wait for him to wake up.

Well, technically there was lots to do - she should be writing up her formal statement, checking in with the rest of the team for updates, helping to sort through any new evidence that was being brought in, putting together notes for the federal prosecutors, and planning their strategy for the next day's work.

But she couldn't do any of those things without getting up from where she was ensconced with Jane wedged on his side between her body and the back of the couch, her arm around him, his head on her chest, so in practical terms she had no choice but to let it all be.

The murderer was in custody. They could manage the rest without her for one night. And she hoped that even in his comatose state, her proximity might bring Jane some comfort, that he would breathe her in and feel her touch and hear her heartbeat and know he was safe.

Besides which, now that she had him back, she wasn't about to let go. The pleasure of his body against hers was one she'd become frighteningly attached to in the scant days they'd spent as a couple. And bad things happened when she wasn't there to watch over him.

Eventually, he grew restless, jerking against her every few minutes, making wordless noises of distress until she soothed him back into quietude.

Then his whole body tensed and he looked up at her, face full of panic.

"You're safe," she told him. "We arrested the murderer. You've been drugged but you're all right. You just need to sleep it off."

He murmured an incomprehensible question, which she inferred was about her from the way he was looking frantically up and down her body. "I'm fine," she said. "I was never in any danger. We're home again now. Just relax and rest. I'm right here, I won't go anywhere." She continued murmuring reassurances until he slipped back under.

They went through variations of the same scene twice more before he woke more gradually and looked at her with real awareness.

"Welcome back," she said, reaching up with the hand not already holding him to stroke his cheek. "How are you feeling?"

"Not so good," he admitted. "What happened?"

"Nurse Edward put ketamine in your tea. You went back to your room to try to tell us what happened, but you passed out before you could. We saw something was wrong from the video, though, so Van Pelt was waiting in your room when he broke in and tried to hang you. He's in custody. I figured you'd be more comfortable at home than at a hospital while you slept it off, so that's where we are."

A look of relief and confusion passed over his face. "That's all?" he asked.

She thought she understood. "Ketamine can cause hallucinations. Whatever you thought you saw… it wasn't real."

He closed his eyes and put an arm around her. "I was paralyzed," he said, voice rough. "I couldn't move or say anything. The murderer used me to set a trap, and when you came to save me…"

He didn't finish, but she understood. "I wasn't even in the room until he was already in handcuffs," she said. "We were the ones who trapped him."

"I thought it was Edward," he murmured. "He was too…" His voice trailed off, another shadow falling across his face.

"You saw something else too," she guessed. "What was it?"

He shook his head a little, a tear spilling down his cheek.

"Tell me," she insisted, stroking his hair, guilt at exploiting his weakened state more than outbalanced by her need to understand what was hurting him.

He took a shaking breath. "Angela came to me," he confessed, voice thin and brittle. "She said… she said if I'd really loved her I wouldn't have been able to live without her. She said if I'd meant my vows I shouldn't have let death separate us. I should have gone with her and Charlotte."

She didn't let her caresses falter. "You know that wasn't really her," she said gently. "You were hallucinating."

"Yeah," he agreed, voice scratchy.

She bit her lip, unsure how to find out what she needed to without causing him unnecessary pain. "When was the last time you thought seriously about killing yourself?"

"The day we killed Red John," he said without hesitation. She couldn't help drawing in a shocked breath. That was less than six months ago. But she kept stroking his head, waiting for him to go on.

"For a long time, I didn't plan to outlive him," Jane admitted. "I didn't want to. Then it stopped being just about revenge. I wanted Red John dead so I - so we could be free of him as well. I started to imagine an after. So suicide - assuming I lived that long - became less of a plan than a… possibility. But I knew it would hurt you, and I didn't want that. So I made plans to flee the country instead. Then when the day actually came, I knew I couldn't die or run away because I still had work to do, bringing down the rest of McAllister's network. But I still thought about it, before we went in to face him. Out of habit as much as anything."

"And since then?" she prompted.

"Meh," he said. "It crossed my mind, I suppose, when I was sorting through everything, after it was all really over. But not with any intention behind it. Just… laying to rest a path not taken."

"What about while you were undercover?"

He pushed himself up enough to look at her properly. "That wasn't real," he said.

She just met his gaze, telling him without words that she knew how to read pain in him.

"I did that by pretending I'd lost you," he said. "I'm not in that place anymore. I would never, never choose death if I had the option of spending my days with you instead. I promise you that you'll never have to survive my suicide."

She nodded her acceptance. She saw the loophole he'd left for himself, but she wasn't going to press him for more. Instead, she cradled his cheek in her hand and leaned up toward him, keeping her eyes open to watch his face for any sign that her kiss would be unwelcome. But he met her halfway, his mouth soft but desperate, and she pulled him with her as she sank back into the couch.

He smelled of sour sweat and the wrong shampoo, but his weight was familiar and perfect, and he kissed her like she was spring water in the desert - like he hadn't quite believed she was real until he could taste her, like a sip of her might save his life.

She melted into the couch and let him mold himself against her, the iron bands around her heart beginning to loosen. He was still here. He was still hers. They weren't over before they'd more than begun.

After a while, he slid down to nuzzle her neck. His kisses grew slower, and after a few minutes she realized he'd fallen asleep again. She petted his back, and her eyes drifted shut too.

When she woke, it was still dark, and she was covered with a throw blanket instead of with Jane. Apparently even prescription sedatives weren't a match for his insomnia. Worried, she groped to turn on the lamp on the end table. The sudden illumination elicited a hiss of objection from Jane, who turned out to be sitting in the chair beside the couch.

"What're you doing?" she mumbled, trying to blink through her grogginess. He had clearly been awake for a while. His face was drawn with weariness and there was a glint in his eyes that suggested fear or even desperation. She pushed herself into a sitting position. "What's wrong?"

"I want to take it off," he said, gaze darting as if looking for a way out. "But I can't."

She wondered for a moment if he was hallucinating again, before seeing how he was fidgeting. "Are you talking about your ring?"

His head dipped in assent.

"Can you tell me why it's bothering you all of a sudden?" she asked, trying to make her voice warm and soothing.

He drew in a sharp breath. "For so long it was a symbol of my failures as a husband, of my commitment to avenging them, of everything else I had to sacrifice to do that. It became a talisman of pain instead of one of love. And then at some point after we got McAllister, I realized I wasn't bound by any of those vows anymore. But I thought that taking it off would leave me… untethered. After I realized how I felt about you, keeping it on seemed like it might be wrong, but I didn't want to do anything that would make you ask questions before I was ready. And then this case happened and I needed it again to play my part. It helped me feel what I had to in there. But that's done now and I don't want to feel that way anymore. I don't want to be tied physically to the worst parts of my life. But my hand feels so wrong when I try to take it off, I can't stand it. I've had it on for so long - my body feels like it needs it. I should be able to put it down but I can't - I _can't."_

He looked at her with pleading eyes, and she understood that he needed her help. She considered telling him that the drugs in his system were wrecking his emotional state and he'd probably feel much better after a few more hours of rest, but he looked far too distressed to sleep. And his feelings were, of course, perfectly valid. But what could she do? She couldn't hypnotize him into not minding an empty finger, and she felt ill-equipped to talk him through these murky waters. Then her eyes dropped from his face to his hands, and it occurred to her that this was a tangible problem, and perhaps she could offer him a tangible solution.

"Okay, I'm going to try something to help you," she said, feeling too unsure to put her idea into words. "Wait here."

She got up and went to the kitchen for supplies, then hesitated in the doorway to the living room. "Close your eyes and hold out your hands," she instructed with confidence she did not feel. She didn't think she could do it with him watching her.

When he'd complied, she came and knelt before him. She carefully slid his ring off and pressed it into the palm of his right hand, folding his fingers over so he wouldn't drop it. Then she picked up the strand of cooking twine she'd gotten from the kitchen (he'd bought it a month ago for one of his more gourmet dinners - a crown of lamb, she thought). She looped it several times around his finger, in the indentation left by the ring, the skin there pale and especially naked, concentrating on not making it too loose or too tight. She tied it off with a good knot and trimmed the trailing ends with a pair of scissors.

Then she looked up at him, still holding his hand in hers. "Okay, that's it," she said. "How does that feel?"

He looked at her with an expression she couldn't interpret, then down at his hand. He opened and closed his fist, testing the feel of it, then rubbed the twine with his thumb. He met her eyes again. "It's -" he broke off and cleared his throat. "That helps, thank you. I think - that should work." He flashed a brilliant smile that she didn't believe. "You're a genius."

She shook her head fondly. "I'm just more practical than you."

"That too." His face sobered, and he held out his wedding ring to her. "Would you put this somewhere safe for me? I think it'll be easier to get used to the change if it's somewhere I can't see it."

She accepted it, uneasily aware she was still kneeling before him. She fiercely refused to contemplate any potential connotations or parallels to other exchanges between couples. She was just helping him through a rough night. That was all.

She turned away and left him sitting behind her as she sought a sufficiently secure storage location. Putting it on the chain with her cross wouldn't keep it out of sight. Her jewelry box seemed too obvious, too much a part of daily life. Instead her feet carried her to the guest bedroom. She pulled the storage tub with things from her childhood out of the closet and found the cigar box in which she kept mementos of her mother. She put Jane's ring carefully inside it and put everything back where it was.

When she got back to the living room, he looked calmer, and though he was still playing with the string on his finger, he didn't seem disturbed by it. "Do you think you could sleep more now?" she asked.

He shrugged. "May as well try."

"Let's go to bed."

He rubbed his face. "I'll clean up a little first."

They changed into pajamas and brushed their teeth together quietly. Jane cast a longing glance at the shower, but settled for washing up at the sink. He still didn't look quite steady on his feet.

In bed, he wrapped himself around her tightly, burying his face in her hair. "I love you so much," he told her softly. "Let's never do that again."

She gave a little choke of laughter. "Next time I'll go undercover with you," she said. "I can be the crazy lady down the hall in the asylum." She screwed her eyes shut. "I _missed_ you," she said, and wondered if it would ever get easier to say such things to him. Surely practice would help.

He pulled her impossibly closer to him. "I was a little afraid you would have come to your senses and decided you liked having your apartment to yourself again."

Her heart constricted in her chest. She could tell from his tone that what he'd said was an understatement. "I hated it," she admitted. "Everything felt wrong."

"For me too," he said, his voice gravelly.

She swallowed. "You said… you pretended you'd lost me." She didn't know quite what she wanted to ask.

She felt him shrug against her back. "I was so happy with you. And I had to make that go away to do the job. I couldn't see any other way to fake it well enough."

Her eyes burned as she thought of what he'd put himself through. It wasn't right. Their job was important, but Patrick Jane had already spent far too much time in a hell of his own design. She never wanted to send him back there again. She wondered if he viewed further punishment as his rightful penance. She had no idea how to talk to him about any of that, so she tried to concentrate on her relief that he was with her again instead.

She hugged the arms he'd wrapped around her. "There were - a lot of times during the Red John case when I wished we could have this," she said. She didn't even mean the romantic aspect - just the comfort of his body beside hers. A hug. A single touch. It had all seemed so impossible for so long. The blurrier their emotional boundaries had gotten, the more imperative it had seemed to maintain their physical ones, until just holding his hand for a few minutes in the aftermath of catastrophe had felt like a daring liberty.

"Me too," he agreed.

This night felt a lot like those old bad ones had, and it occurred to her that this was a chance to redeem them, to give each other now what they hadn't been able to then. "Tell me you won't leave me again," she said, voice almost a whisper.

"Never," he said immediately, "not for a minute longer than I have to."

She wanted to offer him something in exchange, but she didn't know what would help. "What do you need me to tell you?" she asked. There were so many things she hadn't said yet, that she didn't know how to say, but she felt that in that instant she could give him anything.

She could practically hear him thinking as he hesitated before answering. "Tell me I can stay."

It almost hurt, how little he felt he could ask of her. But she hadn't yet shown him otherwise. "This is your home," she said, trying to put into her voice everything she meant by that. "You belong here."

He took a shuddering breath. " _You're_ my home," he said. "Where thou lodgest, I will lodge."

She found, despite all her fears, that she believed him. It struck her that this felt more real, more meaningful, than all the romantic promises he'd made about their future when he declared his love. She didn't trust hopes or dreams or happiness, but she trusted this raw, wounded need. She understood that this was a symptom of her own damage, that she felt more comfortable in crisis and extremity than in pleasant leisure. She knew who to be, and how to be with him, at times like this in a way she didn't on a date or a vacation.

She would have to change, she realized. If not for her own sake, then for his. She didn't want this life for him anymore. She didn't want him to have to suffer so she could give him comfort. He shouldn't have to cling to her in desperation for her to have faith in his devotion.

When she agreed to get involved with him, she'd been more than half convinced that sooner or later, it would all go up in smoke. And the more she'd enjoyed being with him, those few days they had together, the more it had terrified her. Then he'd been undercover, and her terror had shifted form. So where did that leave her next week when - hopefully - life was back to normal and they were working a case that didn't swallow them whole? She knew that fear could not be the foundation of a lasting relationship. But she had been afraid for him - even, she could grudgingly admit to herself, _of_ him, or at least the power he had over her - forever. She had no idea how to let it go.

It was somewhat comforting to see that he was afraid too. She understood now that she'd misread his pain during his assignment. It was just that she'd thought the only thing that could hurt him that much was the loss of his family.

Her breath caught in her throat as the implication of that hit home. Maybe he thought of _her_ as his family now, not just in a loose metaphoric sense but for real and true. She knew that was what the Bible verse he'd just quoted meant. But she'd taken it as one of those silly hyperbolic things Jane liked to tell her these days, like he wanted to spend the rest of his life making her happy, or she gave his life meaning, or…

Oh Hell. Maybe all of those things he'd said to her hadn't just been charming nonsense intended to win her over in that characteristically over the top way of his. It had just been so overwhelming and improbable that she'd focused on the most central and salient points, namely that he believed he was in love with her and wanted to act on it, and not paid much attention to the rest.

But it was true that on matters of real importance to their lives, he seldom exaggerated. She was just used to that focused intensity applying only to terrible things. The better his mood was, the less she took him seriously. But she could see now that she might need to recalibrate that assumption. His emotional landscape had clearly changed significantly in the past few months, while she… well, it was normal for him to be three steps ahead of her, waiting for her to catch up.

Maybe they had more to build on than just fear after all.

She realized she'd been lost in her thoughts for too long and glanced over her shoulder, only to find that Jane had drifted off to sleep, though his grip on her had barely slackened. She sighed and closed her own eyes, wriggling into the mattress to get more comfortable.

They were together again. That was enough for tonight. She could worry about the rest of it tomorrow. She could make sure he got a good breakfast and then type up her statement while he napped on the couch, and then maybe in the afternoon if he was up to it she'd take him out to feed the ducks in the park. It would be good for him to get outside, after all that time locked up indoors. She'd make him wear a scarf if it was cold. She'd…

But the rest of her thought went nowhere, for Teresa Lisbon had fallen asleep.


	2. Chapter 2

Part 2:

Patrick Jane woke up to an empty bed, but at least it smelled like home and not like industrial detergent. He felt hung over and foggy, and his mouth tasted like death, but he thought things were probably all right. The previous night was disjointed in his mind; some parts that seemed real had obviously been hallucinations, and some parts that seemed like dreams he thought had most likely been real.

But he was definitely not in that place anymore, and Patrick Russell could be packed into a box and never taken out again, so today was already way ahead of yesterday. Besides, he was pretty sure that Teresa kissing him had actually happened, and that meant that all was not lost.

He wanted to go find her and get a proper look at her now that his brain was mostly functional, but he decided his chances of getting her onto his lap while he drank a cup of tea - which was his highest hope for the morning - would be significantly better if he didn't smell so bad, so he detoured to the bathroom instead.

While he brushed his teeth, he eventually noticed his reflection in the mirror. He looked haggard, older than he thought he should, his eyes red-rimmed and a bit wild. It reminded him of how he'd been after his first stint on a locked ward, and he didn't like it: he'd come a long, hard way since then, and it was going to take more than a bad case of a bad case to drag him back.

He spat out his toothpaste and turned on the hot water in the sink. Shaving was a relief. Smooth cheeked, he looked more like Patrick Jane, FBI Consultant. The mind follows the body, he told himself as he turned toward the shower.

He was in the middle of soaping himself before he noticed the string tied around his ring finger. He really was out of it. For a moment he couldn't remember how it had gotten there, and then fragments came back to him: darkness, tooth-gnashing desperation, Teresa kneeling in front of him.

His heart galloped and he felt a sudden urge to do something, but he had no idea what. He had to make an unusual effort to understand what was happening to him. Was it discomfort? Excitement? Anxiety? He rubbed at the string on his finger experimentally, like a child tonguing a loose tooth, trying to decide if it hurt. It felt different, but not bad, he concluded.

He could still, a voice in the back of his mind reminded him, ask Lisbon for his ring back. She wouldn't hold it against him, at least not consciously. But when he imagined sliding that band back over his finger, the feeling that came with it was... dread. He didn't want that. He was, he realized, glad to be rid of it, even if it had taken a drug-induced crisis to make it happen.

He'd tried taking the ring off a few times in the mental hospital during the case, under the covers at night where no one could see. It had started to feel so very heavy. But he'd panicked every time. Was he panicking now? No, that wasn't it.

He flashed again to the image of Teresa in the living room, kneeling with his hand in hers. His poor darling. She'd doubtless been madly trying to repress the symbolism of the scene. But even if she couldn't face it, he could. She had replaced his wedding ring with a token of her own. His body flooded with possessive heat. Regardless of what had gone on in her mind during their separation - and his eagerness to find out about that was only partially mitigated by his knowledge that he was not yet in top form to rebut any qualms about him she may have developed in his absence - she hadn't given up her claim on him.

It was deeply reassuring. It was also, he found, quite a turn on. He remembered that after his wedding, every time he'd noticed the ring on his finger he'd wanted to tear Angie's clothes off. At least he was consistent in his predilections, he supposed.

He wondered if he should try to hide the strength of his reaction from Teresa. On the one hand, he'd promised to be more open with her, and feelings that directly pertained to their relationship seemed high on the list of things she had a right to expect his honesty about. On the other, if he let on what that piece of string was doing to him, she might try to flee the city. He decided that he'd assess her state of mind before determining how to proceed.

And in the mean time, he could do them both a favor by trying not to read more into it than she'd intended. Not that it was inconsequential that a symbol of his grief and guilt had been exchanged for a gesture of care from the woman who - from the woman in his life. He knew she'd been hesitant to label her feelings for him, and it seemed unacceptably presumptuous to do it for her, even within his mind.

Jane turned off the shower, having finished washing while he pondered. After quickly drying off and dressing, he sought out tea and Teresa.

She was sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee, but she rose when she saw him. "I'll just switch the kettle back on," she said, but instead of letting her do so, he caught her in an embrace.

Her arms rose to circle his neck after only a brief hesitation, and he kissed the side of her head. She always smelled so good. He wondered if her scent was this appealing to everyone, or if his brain was uniquely hooked on her body chemistry.

"How are you feeling?" she asked him.

"Mostly human," he said. He put his hands on her shoulders and took a step back from her so he could observe her state. Not great, he decided. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her face was pale and a little puffy. She looked... burdened, uneasy, relieved but not calm. He'd been away from her so long he couldn't easily trace the origins of each emotion, but he could tell they related primarily to him. "How are you doing?" he asked.

She forced a half smile. "Better," she said, her gaze flickering away from his face.

"Better than what?"

She shrugged and broke away from him, going to turn on the kettle and get out the things to make tea. "I was afraid for you," she told him, facing the counter. "I kept imagining the murderer would strike and there wouldn't be enough time to stop it, and I'd just be stuck watching on a screen while you died." Her voice cracked a little at the end.

The scenario she conjured was strikingly similar to the hallucination he'd suffered the night before. He supposed it stood to reason, given each of their pasts, that they both feared helplessness in the face of loss.

He didn't know how to comfort her. He couldn't deny that there had been a risk, though he hadn't felt it was too high (potentially being murdered had seemed, to him, the least of his troubles for most of that time), and in any case it was finished now. But she was clearly upset by how much it had upset her, and they both knew her reaction had been exacerbated by their personal relationship. He was terrified she'd decide she needed to retreat from him now for her own protection, or to maintain her precious professionalism. She hadn't seemed to want distance last night, but that had been in the aftermath of an attempt on his life, with emotions running high. In the cold light of morning it could all seem very different to her. She'd been wary enough of their romantic involvement from the start - he'd really hoped to have longer to show her its benefits before its less pleasant repercussions made themselves known, amplifying all her fears about letting him in.

"It was a good plan," he reminded her, wanting to prompt a further reaction. "Grace and Wayne were there all along. I wasn't alone."

She turned around to face him. "What if I don't want you to take assignments like that anymore?" Her voice was both defiant and deeply uncertain. It was, he could tell, a genuine question, possibly one she was asking both of them.

"Like what?"

She shrugged. "Where we're separated and you're in danger." A shadow crossed her face. "Or ones that make you hurt yourself."

He knew she didn't mean physically, and he couldn't say she was wrong. The case had hurt. He felt a long way from happily lovestruck man he'd been before turning himself into a withered husk, and he didn't know how to reverse the change. He still had a powerful depressant in his system, but that was far from all that was amiss.

He could admit that he'd miscalculated when they came up with the plan. He'd spent most of the past decade in spitting distance of a mental health crisis, after all - how hard could it be to call that back up on demand? But he'd radically underestimated how far he'd come since McAllister's death. When he'd begun to prepare himself for his role, he'd thought he could just lock up his feelings for Lisbon and hers for him, the way he had before he'd unpacked a dark corner of his memory palace and discovered his love for her. But he'd found he couldn't unring that particular bell.

If he'd only had to pass for another patient, he could have faked a breakdown easily enough. But he'd been meant to draw the attention of a killer who was attuned to pain. That meant he needed to be the most hopeless case in the mental hospital. So he'd drawn on the only scenario that could destroy his will to live enough to fit the bill: he'd made himself believe he'd lost Lisbon entirely. Heaven knew he'd given her enough reason, over the years, to wash her hands of him. It was easy enough to imagine he'd pushed her just a little too far and crossed the point of no return. At first it hadn't been so hard to remember that it was a game he was playing, especially when he could hear the concern in her voice every night when he checked in. But as the days went by, it became increasingly clear she was keeping something from him, and he knew she'd never forgive him for pressing her about it on a recorded channel. And given what he spent his days telling himself… well, his imagination was only too ready to fill in what she might not be saying.

But he had to focus on her words now, not on his fears. And what she'd told him was that she wanted to mitigate the risk of being with him by reducing the level of external threat he faced. Which he liked much better than her trying to mitigate the risk by removing herself from him instead. It was, in fact, a sentiment he could very much sympathize with. But how far could he push her in making that point? Well, if she could ask questions, so could he.

"What if I don't want you taking that kind of assignment either?" he asked.

Her brow creased. "I'm the one with the gun," she reminded him. "I'm trained to handle dangerous situations."

He refrained from rolling his eyes. "What do you think the past decade or so has been for me if not training in how to handle dangerous situations? And believe me, none of your training makes what's going to happen when a bullet meets your skull any different than what happens when it meets mine."

She crossed her arms over her chest. "I know that," she said. "I just…"

He walked over to her and rubbed her shoulders. "You were just scared," he said. "I know, darling. I get scared for you too. I wasn't trying to say no to you, by the way. I just want you to understand it goes both ways. Our jobs are dangerous. But that doesn't mean there can't be a limit on the amount of risk we're willing to tolerate."

She stared up at him with those big, pained eyes of hers. "I know you worry," she said. "Sometimes I think you'd be much better off with someone who had a nice safe office job instead."

He scowled at her. "There's no one for me but you, so get that ridiculous notion out of your head. You'll just have to live with the fact that whenever you're tackling a gun-toting suspect to defend the innocent, you're putting my heart in the line of fire along with your own." He shrugged. "Besides, you're very good at what you do. I imagine before too much longer you'll get promoted to a supervisory position where you aren't in the field so much."

"I barely even have a job at this point," she groused, giving him a suspicious look and clearly trying to gauge whether he was planning on manipulating her career trajectory to suit himself.

He had in fact entertained thoughts to that effect, but he wasn't about to own up to it. It wasn't as if he would _do_ anything until he knew what she actually wanted. This was, in fact, the main reason he'd pushed her to take this last case and overriden her doubts about his involvement. As the leader of a team that had caught not one but two California serial killers in a single year, he was certain they could land her any position she liked, whether it was getting fully onboard at the FBI or having a hand in building whatever new institution was in the works to replace the CBI, or even becoming a sought-after independent consultant.

The tea kettle whistled before she could interrogate him further. Seeing that she wanted to fuss over him, he sat down at the table while she brewed the tea and refilled her coffee mug.

Patrick lapsed into thought, pondering what sort of job would be best suited to Lisbon's interests and skills that wouldn't involve what he considered an unacceptable chance of premature death.

He was jarred from his reverie when she put a cup of tea and a plate of buttered toast down in front of him. He looked up at her, only to find her staring at his hands with a frown on her face. He realized he was toying with the string on his finger.

She took a deep breath. "You can tell me if you want your ring back," she said, studiously avoiding his gaze. "It's fine if you don't want to… Last night you weren't in a state of mind to be making permanent decisions. I wouldn't…"

He took pity on her and cut off her floundering. "Thank you, Teresa, but I don't want it back." She did look at him then, and he tried to smile at her reassuringly. "I'm not a married man. I may as well stop playing the part." He considered how to say what he wanted to without coming on too strong. "If I wear a ring on that finger again, it won't be Angela's."

She looked surprised at that, but she didn't panic, which he considered a win. She just nodded and picked up her coffee again.

"So what's the plan for today?" he asked, thinking they could both use a lighter topic of conversation.

"You just take it easy and get more rest," she told him sternly. "I can take your statement here, and write up my own. I'm hoping I can stay home today, but it'll depend on what I hear from the team."

"Mm," he agreed, eating a bite of toast.

They finished their breakfast peacefully, then settled onto the couch in the living room, Lisbon lying with her computer on her legs and her feet on Jane's lap. After he finished dictating his statement, he watched TV with the volume on low while she worked on her own paperwork and texted with their colleagues.

After lunch, she got a phone call from Van Pelt that she didn't like, which was obvious from the line between her eyes and her increasingly terse tone of voice, though Patrick couldn't glean the exact nature of the issue from her half of the conversation. But from the way she glanced at him a couple of times, he suspected it had to do with his role in the case.

"Problem come up?" he asked neutrally, when she didn't offer an explanation after ending the call.

She sighed. "Nurse Edward won't confess to anything but what he did to you."

"He's not an idiot," Patrick said. "And he's not motivated by ego. He's a true believer in his own cause. He's probably figured out that if we can't convict him of actual murder, in a few years he could be out of prison and doing his thing again."

Teresa scowled unhappily. "Van Pelt says that even though he understands you were an undercover agent, he refuses to believe that you aren't actually massively depressed. He's still claiming he was saving you from a life of misery. She thinks if we brought you in to confront him and you convinced him you were perfectly happy, you could break his confidence in his worldview."

"It's not a bad idea."

She studied his face. "I don't think it should happen today. You're still recovering. We have plenty to hold him on already. Maybe a few days to think things through in jail before seeing you wouldn't hurt either."

He considered this. "Seeing me sooner rather than later might provide more of a shock." He smiled humorlessly. "If you put off the big reveal for too long, the drama diminishes. But it wouldn't work now. I don't think I'm up to faking it yet."

"Faking it?"

He shrugged, feeling unpleasantly exposed. "Do I look perfectly happy to you right now?"

He could feel the weight of her worried gaze. "How can I help?"

He squeezed her feet. He didn't want to tell her. He didn't want to burden her. He didn't want to pressure her. But they had to be able to talk to each other, even when they might not like the answers to their questions. "I told you what I pretended, to play my part in there. Eventually, it got… harder to remember what was real and what wasn't."

He glanced at her. Her face was drawn with unhappiness. He saw that she didn't know what to say. And he found, despite all his hesitation, that he was ready to know where they stood. He could at least make it simple for her. "Did your feelings or what you want from me change while I was away?"

"No," she said without hesitation.

He picked up her computer and put it on the coffee table, then gathered her onto his lap. "Nothing's changed for me either," he told her as she wrapped her arms around his neck, returning his embrace. "But I don't know how to make it feel real again. Can you tell me something happy?" He didn't want to push her into saying anything she wasn't ready to, but he needed something to hold onto. Something to bring back the feeling of their first kiss, the first night he spent holding her, when he could see their whole future spread out ahead of them like the view from a mountaintop, vast and beautiful.

For a while she just clung to him, and he waited, rubbing circles on her back while she nuzzled into his neck. He knew she needed time to think sometimes. She didn't just blurt out the first thing that came into her head as he was apt to do.

Finally she pulled back far enough to see his face. "I think we should buy a house," she told him.

He blinked. This was not what he'd expected. "You do?"

She nodded, toying with his hair. "Maybe not right away, but I think we should think about it. A house with a garden, somewhere you could sit outside and drink your tea. We could get a new couch - I know you don't like mine very much."

"But it won't just be my house," he pointed out. "What will the house have for you?"

"Mm," she said, her lips twisting as she thought for a moment. "A shower big enough for two?"

"That sounds like something for both of us."

"A fireplace," she said. "I want a fireplace. I know you don't need one here, but we had one when I was a kid, and I always loved making s'mores at home and then just sitting and watching the flames all the way until they died down into a few last flickering embers."

He couldn't keep himself from kissing her then, so he didn't try. He sighed when her mouth opened to let him in, sinking into her like an ocean. She kissed him back like she meant it, like she'd missed him, like she wanted to pour herself into him as well.

She pulled back sometime after his hands slipped inside her shirt (her skin felt so good, so warm, he hadn't realized how much he'd missed it until he felt her again). "You look happy," she said tenderly, her own eyes bright.

He evaluated himself. It felt like she'd lit a lantern inside of him. He closed his eyes to stow the moment away in his memory palace. "I am happy," he told her when he was finished. "Let's go crack a killer!"

In the car on the way to the FBI building, Jane leaned his head against the passenger side window and watched the city go by. They were going to have a house of their own. It was ridiculous and backwards and perfect, just like everything else about their relationship. She hadn't said that she loved him, they hadn't even had sex yet (he'd been waiting to have a stretch of uninterrupted time for them to explore each other properly), and they'd been together romantically for well under a month, most of which they'd spent separated.

But he thought he understood why Teresa had suggested it. Uncomfortable with emotional declarations, she preferred to express her affection in concrete ways - primarily through nurturing and protecting. And her greatest fear regarding their relationship was that he might leave her (again). A house was a commitment she could ask him for without frightening herself, a tangible way of tying him to a future with her. It was also something she wanted to give him, a way to make him happy.

He thought about the plants in her apartment. One day a couple of months after McAllister's death, when he'd still been trailing around after her in a distracted haze, sifting through the past and trying to make sense of his life, she'd come home late after work with four houseplants in the back of her car. She'd informed him that if he planned to continue staying with her, he'd have to start making himself useful, and he could do it by keeping her plants alive. She'd shoved a newly acquired watering can into his hands and demanded to know if he had any questions.

He had accepted this responsibility with a kind of baffled bemusement. He had no idea what had gotten into her, but if watering a few plants was going to keep him from being turfed out of her apartment, it seemed a small price to pay. It had, in fact, been reassuring - if she was bothering to assign him chores, it probably meant she viewed his unilateral invasion of her living space as an at least temporarily viable arrangement. He'd been attempting to make himself an inoffensive houseguest, but he knew she valued her privacy.

After a couple of weeks, he'd found he liked taking care of Lisbon's plants. He liked the smell of the potting soil when he tested its moisture level with a finger, and seeing new leaves bud and unfurl, and he liked the green watering can decorated with cheerful red ladybugs.

It took even longer for him, in his foggy condition, to make sense of where she'd put the plants. He'd watched her carefully position each one that first day, though they weren't in what seemed like obvious places where they might get the most sun or fill an empty corner of a room. Instead, she had, he eventually realized, located them where they'd be directly in his line of sight from his chair at the table or his end of the couch. He concluded that she'd actually gotten the plants for him to begin with, even if she'd never admit it. He still wasn't quite sure what had possessed her to do so, other than that she'd been worried about him and thought they might help. And maybe they had.

So now she wanted to give him a whole garden. He had no doubt that he'd be the one responsible for maintaining it as well, but he found he rather liked the idea. In Malibu they'd had gardeners take care of everything, but it might be nice to plant some seeds and watch them grow. He could put in a few herbs and vegetables, maybe some aromatic flowers - jasmine bushes, honeysuckle, lavender. He wondered what sort of flowers Teresa liked best.

He was still lost in landscape design daydreams when they pulled into the FBI parking lot. He unbuckled his seatbelt, but Lisbon caught his arm before he could get out. He saw at once that she was concerned.

"I don't think this is a good idea," she said. "You shouldn't talk to Edward today. Why don't you just come in and nap on the couch while I work for a couple hours, and then we can go home again."

"I'll be fine." He flashed her a smile. "Come on, you cheered me up for this, let's get it over with."

"I did not cheer you up for _this,_ you unmitigated idiot," she snapped, glaring daggers at him, "I cheered you up for _you._ "

"In either case, I am cheered up," he pointed out, "so we may as well go in there and get a confession."

"And what if facing Edward brings you back to where you were before instead? The man tried to kill you last night, he's going to try to persuade you you'd be better off dead."

"Well, he's not going to succeed, and if the interrogation does get me down for some reason, you can just cheer me up again afterward." He grinned at her. "I have great confidence in your capacity to improve my mood."

"That's not the point!" She blew out a frustrated breath. "I thought you were getting better. I thought things were different now."

Now he was frustrated too. He really couldn't see what he'd done wrong lately. He hadn't run off or tricked her or deviated even slightly from the agreed-upon plan. And it wasn't like this was the first time he'd be interrogating someone who'd wanted to kill him in the past. "Just what is it you think is the matter with me?"

"You're reckless with yourself! Ever since I've known you, you just hurl yourself into explosive situations and start poking them with a stick," she accused. "You have no sense of self-preservation! And I understood why, back then, you were careless of your life and your wellbeing. I thought that had changed, though. But here you are again, jumping into things without caring whether there's anywhere safe to land."

Patrick thought she was overreacting, but knew better than to say so. It was, he reminded himself, sweet that she cared so much about his welfare. Her concern had kept him alive for years, even when it felt like an unwanted constraint. Maybe especially then. "That's not what this is," he said, attempting patience. "We're talking about a supervised interrogation in FBI headquarters, not some half-baked gambit I cooked up behind your back. I haven't done anything at all reckless during the course of this case." He took her hands. "Teresa, I know this was harder on both of us than we thought it would be, but that's not because I've been careless."

She stared at him for a long moment, her jaw tense, her eyes suspiciously glossy. "I'm afraid you don't have limits," she said finally. "I think you're in the habit of just doubling down whenever things get dicey, regardless of the consequences, instead of backing off and trying something different. I need you to believe that your welfare is more important than solving a case. Than solving _any_ case."

"You put yourself at risk or run yourself into the ground to solve cases all the time," he pointed out. "We all do, it's part of the job." He cut her off before she could interrupt. "But I do have limits. I promise you, I don't want to die, and I'm not out to punish myself further." He wondered, briefly, if that was really true. If he did have a different risk-assessment criteria for himself than he had not just for Lisbon but for anyone else on the team as well. "I won't tell you not to worry about me. I worry about you too. But these aren't all or nothing issues. We're just going to have to keep wading through them time after time. And this time, right now, it's all right. Seeing Edward isn't going to ruin my mental health, and I think you know that. You've just had a lot of concern for me built up over past week or two with no outlet for it, so it's all coming out now."

She studied him, frown back in full force. "You don't see it," she said at last. "You don't even know what I'm talking about, do you?" She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again. "Look, I believe that you have _some_ limits now, all right? But they're not in the right place. If they were, you would never have taken this assignment. You should have said no, but you practically insisted on doing it instead."

He blinked in surprise. When they'd been making the plan, she'd talked to him about whether going undercover would be too hard for him, whether it would bring back memories of his last stay in such an institution, whether he should at least have a cover story a bit further from the truth, but after he'd assured her it wouldn't be a problem, he hadn't seen any indication she was uncomfortable with going forward. Had she wanted him to call it off from the start? Ah. No. She'd trusted him and now felt she'd been wrong. "I admit I miscalculated," he said. "I wasn't thinking very clearly before the case, and it turned out to be harder than I anticipated."

He'd barely been thinking at all, had been the truth. He'd been giddy and on top of the world and, wrapped up in her sudden affections, had felt untouchable, like nothing could stop him. He'd wanted another feather in Lisbon's professional cap, and he'd liked the challenge of catching a serial killer who even half the FBI still didn't believe was the real deal, and he'd come up with a plan to do it. It had seemed very simple at the time.

Her eyes narrowed. "And when exactly did you figure out it was going to be much worse than you thought?"

He considered lying, but decided she wouldn't believe him anyway. "About six hours before I went in."

"And at that point, did you even think about calling it off? Or telling me that it was going to be utter misery for you?"

He wished, sometimes, that she wasn't quite so good at her job. Or that she wasn't quite so good at _him._ He thought that even a few years ago, he would have been able to weasel his way past her on this. But this was, he supposed, the price of actually being close to someone again. "No."

Everything had already been in motion, and he hadn't wanted to worry her. Besides, he'd felt getting her the big win and stopping the killer would be worth it. The local FBI brass hadn't been taking the case seriously based on one confirmed murder and some suspicious statistics - if their team didn't step in, possibly no one would until there were more victims, and it wasn't as if Rigsby would be able to persuade anyone he was suicidal. So Jane had accepted that he was going to have a lousy time and stuck to the plan. He still wasn't convinced it had been the wrong decision. The past week wouldn't even make it into his Top 40 All Time Worst list, and they'd caught Edward. That had to count for something.

But maybe watching it would have been easier for her if he'd given her some advance warning. He hadn't wanted to run the chance of her stopping him, though.

Maybe she was trying to tell him that now he owed her that chance. He considered how he would have felt if their roles were reversed. Maybe she had a point.

She took his hand.

"Patrick," she began, instantly commanding his full attention. He couldn't think if she'd ever used his first name like that before. He looked up at her and fell right into her fathomless eyes. "I need you to tell me when something's going to hurt you next time. Right away. Can you do that for me?"

He nodded. If she said his name and looked at him that way, he would promise her anything she wanted.

"Thank you. Now, as God is my witness, I need you to tell me how you're feeling right now."

He frowned and tried to take an inventory of himself. "I'm all right. Tired, a little worse for the wear, not quite myself yet, but getting there. Very happy to be here with you again." He shot her a grin. "Looking forward to finding a good realtor."

She gave him a searching look. "And do you think facing Edward is going to make you feel worse?"

"No," he said. Edward was just a misguided murderer. Edward had never been the problem, other than how he'd precipitated the need to go undercover in the first place. " _Really,"_ he insisted when she looked at him skeptically.

"Fine then," she said grumpily. "Let's go get this over with. But I'll be watching the whole time, and if you have a nervous breakdown I'm keeping you locked up at home for a month."

He waggled his eyebrows at her, his mood taking a sudden upward swing. "You're not giving me much of an incentive to stay sane there, sweetheart."

She just glared at him and climbed out of the car.

He jogged to catch up with her, formulating a plan. "Why don't we make this interesting," he suggested brightly. "I will bet you that you'll feel better about my psychological health at the end of the interrogation than you do right now."

She gave him a sidelong glance. "What do you get if you win?"

"You request three full days off for both of us as soon as this case is wrapped up, so I can demonstrate my zest for life to your complete satisfaction."

"And if you lose?"

"You request two full days off for both of us as soon as this case is wrapped up, so you can tend to my wounded psyche."

"I'm sensing a bit of a theme here," she commented wryly.

"Come on, Lisbon," he cajoled. "We've both been working for two weeks straight, we deserve a break. Besides which, you've just been very eloquently arguing that I need to take better care of myself. I think a little time off work would be highly beneficial for me."

"Fine," she said, fighting a smile.

"Shake on it," he insisted.

Rolling her eyes, she stopped walking for a moment and held out her hand. He took it, gave her a gentle pump, then lifted her hand and kissed the back of it, not allowing himself to linger.

She gave him a disapproving look but otherwise let him get away with the gesture, which told him she was still concerned. Maybe he should kiss Van Pelt's hand too, just to prove this behavior was within his standard bounds of eccentricity. She probably deserved it for saving him from a murderer. His lips weren't going near any actual Federal employee though. He wasn't going to turn himself into some hand-kissing hussy just to prove he hadn't been breaking Lisbon's no-inappropriate-displays-of-affection-at-work rule. She was simply going to have to accept that "inappropriate" was a term with a certain amount of subjective flexibility built into it.

By the time he'd finished that train of thought, they'd made it into the building, and he was distracted by the sudden change in her expression.

He followed her icy glare. "You hate Snyder much more than you used to," he observed.

Her jaw tightened. "She endangered your life yesterday."

"Really?" He immediately began to speculate about just what she'd done. He'd known she didn't much care for him or Lisbon, but he hadn't imagined she'd go so far as to let it impact her job performance.

Teresa grabbed his arm, pulling him around to face her frighteningly intense expression. "You are never going to go out in the field with that woman. Under any circumstances. Do you understand?"

He nodded, making a mental note to do something untraceably unpleasant to Agent Snyder sometime soon. No one should get away with making Lisbon that unhappy. Even if she was maddeningly attractive when she was angrily trying to control him for his own good.

His moods had been in rapid flux all day, swinging up and down with unaccustomed vigor. He wasn't sure how much of it was the aftereffects of being drugged, how much was being reunited with Teresa, and how much was a reaction to his role in the case. The most unexpected aspect was the intrusive resurgence of his libido. He'd been attracted to Lisbon in an abstract - and sometimes not so abstract - way since he'd met her. Since their first kiss, his desire for her had been a constant hum in his veins, but lust had taken a back seat to savoring the unfolding of their emotional connection. Until today. Suddenly the seemingly endless fuse of his longing for her was burning down to nothing. He supposed it made psychological sense - the life drive struggling to reassert itself after he'd squashed it down to almost nothing undercover - but it left him off-balance, unsure of himself after consigning himself to a monkish existence for so many years.

Well, he certainly couldn't do anything about it surrounded by their coworkers, so for the moment he had to get some distance from her and focus on the task at hand. "Yes ma'am," he told her with dry irony. "Now why don't you check in with the others and get everything in order for the interrogation. Edward's already used to stonewalling Van Pelt, so I'll take Rigsby in with me."

Her mouth twisted unhappily. "Why don't I-"

"You can't go in there," he interrupted. "I can't have someone worried about me sitting next to me."

"Fine," she snapped, and stalked off toward her desk, casting one last anxious look behind her, as if she wasn't sure it was safe to take her eyes off of him.

Jane headed to the break room and used the pod machine to brew himself a cup of dark, vile coffee. He doctored it liberally with milk and sugar and threw it back in a few gulps, needing the hit of caffeine - droopiness would ruin his act. Then he took a seat at one of the tables and closed his eyes to get himself into the right headspace. He pictured himself in front of a fireplace with Teresa, their arms around each other as they watched the flames, sharing a gentle silence. The two of them eating dinner at an outdoor table under a trellis garlanded with clematis vines on a summer evening. He imagined them older, more lines around their eyes, making excellent use of a spacious shower stall. Older yet, him infuriating her at the breakfast table by making the fork disappear off her plate every time she looked away, until she kicked him viciously and made a show of eating her pancakes with her hands, then wiping her syrup-sticky fingers off on his hair while she distracted him with a kiss.

She wanted all that, he told himself, she wanted it too. And nothing and no one would stop them having it, least of all a piddling little self-deceiving killer like Edward.

He stood up from the table. He was ready for the show.

Nurse Edward was already in the interrogation room when he strode in a few minutes later and took his seat beside Rigsby.

"We haven't been properly introduced," he said, not exactly friendly but radiating contented wellbeing - a sun lamp shining in any direction but his would-be murderer's. "I'm Patrick Jane, I consult for the FBI. This is my colleague, Agent Rigsby, whom I believe you're familiar with - if you ever wondered why he didn't make the beds as crisply as some of the other orderlies, now you know why."

Edward was staring at him like he'd sprouted horns.

"Now, to get the ball rolling," Jane continued, "why don't we start with you explaining why you tried to kill me last night."

"I was ending your suffering," he replied as if by rote.

Jane tilted his head and grinned. "Well, I guess it worked - I'm cured! Funny what not having to pretend you're suicidally depressed anymore will do for a fellow."

"I know you weren't pretending."

"You're too kind." He gave a faux-modest shrug. "I admit it was quite a performance. Among my best."

"No one who hasn't felt true despair could be like that," Edward insisted.

"Oh, I've had my share of dark times," he admitted easily. "Like any actor, I drew on past experience to perform my role convincingly. But that was all long, long ago. I assure you, I'm quite a happy man these days."

Edward shook his head. "People like you don't get better."

Jane _tsk-tsked_ him. "The funny thing about people, Edward, is that it turns out they're all different. There isn't anyone just like me. What you meant is that the persona I put on reminded you of someone who didn't get better. Someone you cared about a great deal, I believe. Your friend from college?"

"Mateo," Edward supplied. "He tried to get better. He saw doctors. He took pills. He went to the hospital five times. And nothing worked."

"You saved his life once, didn't you?"

"The second time he tried it," Edward agreed, wiping his eyes. "He had a gun. I got it away from him and got him to a doctor. It didn't help though. The fourth time he really did it. By then I don't know if I would have stopped him even if I was there."

"But you thought there was something else that might have helped, still," Jane told him, watching his face keenly. "Some treatment, some facility, some doctor who could have saved him. That's why you became a psychiatric nurse. You wanted to find the secret and use it to help other people like Mateo."

Edward nodded.

"And for a while you thought maybe you could. But then there was a special patient. One who reminded you of Mateo. Who was that?"

"His name was Peter. He was schizophrenic. When he took his meds, he didn't hear voices anymore, but he still couldn't stand living."

"He killed himself too?"

"I was the one who found him."

"And that changed your mind?"

"After that I knew there was no helping some people. That giving them treatment or trying to stop their suicides was just torture, forcing them to live through unnecessary suffering when the future held nothing for them but more pain."

"But some people do get better - surely you've seen patients who left treatment and went on to lead happy, productive lives."

"So?" Edward asked.

"So how can you tell which are which?"

"I just know."

"Like you knew about me?"

"Yeah."

"And yet you were wrong about me. I wasn't even a real patient."

"Or you're faking now," he pointed out.

Jane spread his hands. "Do I look like I'm faking?"

Edward just shrugged.

"Since this seems like a sticking point for you, I'll tell you my story. Over a decade ago, I lost my family. A sudden tragedy. I was miserable, I didn't want to live without them, yadda yadda yadda. But a funny thing happened. I did go on living. I got a new job, working with law enforcement, which I found surprisingly fulfilling. And that job forced me to be around people, even when I didn't feel like company. They were good people, and as time went on I made friends with them. Years went by, and they stuck by me even when things got rough and I was a royal pain. And one day I noticed that I didn't mind being alive anymore. There were things I looked forward to again. There were things I enjoyed and wanted to keep enjoying. It turns out that the secret to a happy life is a rewarding job and having people you care about, who would have guessed, right?"

"I coulda told you that on day one, man," Rigsby put in.

"Rigsby's the smart one," Jane said confidingly.

"But how do I know any of that's true?" Edward demanded.

Jane leaned forward toward him. "Here's the thing, though - how can you know it isn't? And if there's even a small chance that it is true, what right did you have to try to take my life and my future away from me?"

Edward just stared at him.

"I have absolutely no desire to die," Jane said, looking him straight in the eyes. "I didn't yesterday either. So maybe there are people who won't ever recover from depression, I don't know for sure. But I am completely certain of two things: some people do get better, and you, Edward, can't tell which ones they are."

It was a true pleasure to watch Edward's face collapse in on itself as the trap closed around him.

Jane let him sit with the truth for a full minute before he spoke again. "What about the last person you killed, Vicky Brown?"

He turned to Rigsby. "Remind me what her mother told us?"

"That Vicky was planning to go back to school when she came home. She wanted to study urban planning."

"Just think," Jane told Edward, "if she was still alive, right now she might be sitting in a classroom. Maybe she'd be feeling a little better about herself because she actually finished all the reading she was assigned, and she thinks maybe today she'll raise her hand for once. Maybe she'll ask to borrow a pen from the woman next to her at the seminar table, and at the end of the class that woman will ask if she wants to study together, and they'll strike up a friendship. Maybe a year from now, that woman will be Vicky's new best friend, a person who finally truly sees who she is, scars and all, and loves her anyway. Maybe in a few more years she'll be starting a new job that sparks some excitement in her, and she'll feel like she's finally on the right path, doing something in the world that reflects what's inside her in a way she feels proud of instead of ashamed about. And maybe in a decade her depression will be nothing more than a bad memory that feels like it belongs to a whole other person. Except none of that's going to happen, is it? Because you stole that possibility from her."

"That wasn't going to happen," Edward said, a little desperate. "She wasn't fixable."

"Now we'll never find out, will we? But I do know one thing about her. Have you wondered yet why we caught you after all this time? It was because of Vicky's autopsy. Her death was ruled a murder because she had defensive wounds. She tried to fight you off when you slit her wrists for her. At that moment, when you were snuffing out her future, she wanted to live."

"That's just animal instinct - it doesn't mean anything."

"It means you were wrong. You were wrong about me and you were wrong about her. How many others do you think you were wrong about too?"

A tear slid down Edward's face.

"It's too late to help them now, but they aren't the only ones you hurt. You stole what wasn't yours to take, not just from your victims but from their families. Vicky's mother cried with relief when we told her what really happened. She was glad that her daughter hadn't abandoned her on purpose, that she hadn't truly given up. You can give that same comfort to the other families you've robbed. So a little boy doesn't grow up thinking his father didn't love him enough to keep breathing. So a wife doesn't think her husband would rather lie in the ground than in her arms. It's the least you can do."

He nodded at Rigsby, who produced a list of all the patients who had died since Edward was hired by the facility. "Mark off which of these people you murdered."

Edward stared at him for a long moment, then sagged and accepted the pen.

Jane waited until he'd finished and signed at the bottom of the page before he stood up. "My colleagues will be in shortly to take a detailed statement."

Edward looked up at him, a plea in his face. "Patrick - wait. Is it really true? Are you happy now?"

"Yes."

"Then why couldn't I save Mateo? What did I do wrong?"

Jane's face went blank. "How should I know? I never met the man." With that, he turned and left the room.

He made his way back to the couch and pretended to nap, in no mood to deal with the other agents. Van Pelt came by a few minutes later and pulled over a chair, wanting to thank him for coming in and getting the confession, and to check on his health. He accepted her pleasantries with as much patience as he could muster and sent her on her way. He did not kiss her hand.

After that came blessed peace. He was still too wired from the coffee to really rest, and too tired to really think, so he just listened to the sounds of the office, and waited, and intermittently tried and failed to determine what he was feeling.

Eventually Lisbon's footfalls approached, and he felt himself relax even before she sat down next to his legs.

"Did I win?" he asked her, lips curving into a smile, eyes still closed.

A familiar sigh. "Sure," she said, game even if not wholly convinced.

His smile widened. "Really, or do you just want the extra day off too?"

"Careful, you might talk me out of it," she warned.

"Heaven forfend," he murmured. "You need to be here long?"

"An hour or two?" It was more of a real question than he'd expected. He realized that his favorite workaholic would actually take the rest of the day off if he asked her to, and it warmed him.

"All right."

She shifted slightly, but didn't get up right away. She was fighting the impulse to touch him, he understood, and he almost opened his eyes to see it, but decided seeing her face would only make him more impatient to get home.

After another moment she rose and walked over to her desk, and soon the familiar clicks and clacks of her work were underway.

He allowed himself to drift. This wasn't where he wanted to be - he wasn't touching her, there were far too many people around - but it wasn't bad, either. It wasn't, for example, a psychiatric ward that smelled of ammonia cleaner and air freshener and fear. He'd thought his previous hospitalization was buried far enough in the past that it wouldn't trouble him any further, but like all his other assumptions about this case, that had been wrong too.

He'd let go of the shame of it, at least. That had never been some nonsense about disdaining those who needed such help. He'd just known, for a long time, that if anyone found out where he'd been, they'd immediately and irrevocably wonder why he wasn't still there. Admitting how broken he'd been seemed indistinguishable from showing how broken he still was. Lisbon hadn't thought that, of course, which had been one of her many gifts to him. But he knew that most others would.

That didn't bother him anymore. He knew he was different now, so it no longer mattered what anyone else thought. So he'd concluded he was over it. But the physical realities of the place had distressed him. The confinement, the intrusive staff, the rigid schedules - it seemed an environment as likely to induce madness as to cure it. And there had been too many reminders of who he'd been, the last time around. Changed or not, the person he'd used to be was still inside him - all those failings, those weaknesses, those fault lines. And he'd since added many more sins to his tally, no matter what else he'd done as well. Even if he wasn't so broken these days, had he changed enough to avoid sabotaging this new chance he'd been given? Or was he still building traps for himself without even seeing it until he'd already fallen into them?

After the first hour, Lisbon dropped a cup of tea off for him - a white tea with notes of peach and jasmine. It was nicer than anything typically stocked by the FBI and he wondered where she'd gotten it. Once it was gone, he lay back down and actually fell asleep.

When Teresa gently shook him awake, evening had fallen. "I'm sorry it took so long," she said, bending over him, "but I thought since you were really out I'd just stay and finish my paperwork. So surprise - we're done for the week!"

He smiled up at her. "Really?"

Her dimples made an appearance. "I know how to hold up my end of a bargain."

"I never doubted you." It was Tuesday - assuming they didn't catch a case over the weekend, that meant five whole days off. It seemed an incredible luxury.

"Come on," she said. "Let's get out of here."

She'd already called ahead for takeout from the good Sichuan place. They ate in the living room, half-watching TV, then cuddled on the couch.

He had a hand tangled in her hair and her head was nestled against him, but she felt too far away.

"What weren't you telling me during the case?" he asked without quite deciding to.

She tilted her neck to look up at him. "What do you mean?"

"When we talked on the radio. I could hear there was something you were keeping from me. But I didn't know what. Can you tell me now?"

She pulled away from him, and for a moment he thought it might be something really awful. Then he got a look at her face and saw that whatever she was wrestling with had more to do with her than with him. She dropped her head, hiding behind her hair, and fidgeted with the cuffs of her sleeves.

"I wasn't doing so well while you were undercover," she admitted stiffly, uncomfortable as ever with any display of weakness. "I didn't want you to find out and do something stupidly dangerous to hurry things along."

"What do you mean, you weren't doing well?" he asked as gently as he could.

"I wasn't sleeping much. There were - nightmares. I couldn't stand watching what you were doing to yourself in there. It was like you were slipping away from me and I didn't know if you were going to come back. If you'd be able to. I felt like I'd made you go through losing your family all over again because I trusted you when you said it would be okay, and I shouldn't have. I knew it was a bad idea but I let you talk me into it because -"

She broke off, but he knew what she'd been going to say. She'd trusted him against her better judgment because he'd promised he'd be more honest with her. And at the first test of that, he'd let her down. His own motives suddenly seemed petty and inadequate.

"I'm sorry," he said.

She shot him a look of mingled hurt, shame, and accusation. "For what? Do you even - do you actually get that your suffering hurts me too? How would you have felt if I'd gone undercover living with an abusive alcoholic, and you had to watch me taking it and not fighting back for twelve days?"

He caught his breath as her words struck home. He could never have endured that. He would have - he would have stormed in and ruined the case. He'd never been as strong as her. "No one was hitting me in there," he said weakly.

She scoffed. "I've seen a dozen people punch you, and it's never hurt you a fraction as much as this case did. When my father beat me, what happened to my body wasn't as bad as the fact that it was _him_ who was doing it. You and I both know that physical pain isn't the worst kind."

"You're right," he said hoarsely. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have put you through that. I should have told you when I knew going undercover would be worse than I thought." He'd promised to make her happy, and less than a week later he'd done _this_ to her. He truly was an undeserving wretch. Maybe he'd been wrong to think he could be what she needed.

He risked a look at her. No. He'd failed her, but he could do better. He had to. The alternative was unthinkable.

He heard a sniffle and realized she was crying. He gathered her in his arms and pulled her against his chest, his own eyes stinging.

"I need you to believe that you _matter,_ " she choked out. "Or at least find a way to _act_ like it."

Everything she'd said to him in the FBI parking lot came back to him, and he thought this time he understood it. "I don't know if I do believe it," he confessed, voice cracking, "but I believe I matter to you. And you are _all_ that matters to me. So maybe - maybe I can take more care with myself for your sake. Because you were right before. I fixate on a goal and I find a way to get there that probably won't get anyone killed, and I rush into it without thinking very hard about the collateral damage, to me or anyone else. Not even to _you_ most of the time. I just figure we'll be able to manage the consequences once they crop up. I'm blinded by my arrogance and my taste for chaos and my - my nihilism, I guess you'd call it. And it works enough of the time I forget what happens when it doesn't. That's why I need you. Because you can slow me down and make me think properly. When I'm honest with you. But I wasn't this time. Can you give me another chance?"

Her arms tightened around him, and he clutched her back.

She pulled back and shook her head at him, a rueful smile tugging at her lips. "You really think that after everything we've been through, _this_ is gonna be the last straw?"

He shrugged, looking at her without a mask, letting her see how afraid he was. "Things are different now. I told you that _I'd_ be different." He knew that whether she was aware of it or not, she wouldn't be able to put up with what she once had anymore. The more of herself she gave to him, the more careful he had to be not to hurt her more than she could stand. He would have liked to think he wouldn't hurt her again at all, but that fantasy had already been shattered.

"You also warned me you'd screw up sometimes. You don't have to get it right all time. You just have to keep trying." She gave him a slow, wicked smile and glanced down at where she was seated on his lap. " _Some_ things are definitely different."

She wriggled a little, and the friction lit his body like lightning. He wanted to touch her in ways she wouldn't allow with the living room blinds wide open. He shot her a look that left no doubt of his intentions and maneuvered them both off the couch. Taking her hand, he led her to their bedroom.

As soon as he let go of her to close the door, she stepped past him, stopping halfway to the bed with her back to him. He could tell by the movement of her arms she was unbuttoning her blouse. He stopped a pace behind her and watched, transfixed, as she finished her work and the garment dropped to the floor between them. His throat thick with emotion, raw desire flooding his veins, he stepped toward her, close enough for her to feel the heat of his proximity, the brush of his breath across her shoulder. Standing in her stocking feet, the difference in their heights had never seemed so vivid, and it made him want to shelter her with his body, to cover every piece of her with himself.

Instead, he raised a single hand, trembling badly, and traced her petal-soft skin with his fingertips, following the line of her arm, then her spine. He swept her dark hair over her shoulder and pressed a slow kiss to the base of her neck, drunk on the way her body responded to him, the pink flush spreading across her flesh, the slight catch in her breath, the fine hairs rising on her forearms.

He couldn't remember feeling this close to another person. He couldn't remember feeling this much at all. Suddenly desperate to feel her against him, he tore the top buttons of his shirt open and pulled it over his head, then wrapped his arms around her and pulled her flush against him, her back to his chest, one arm splayed across her stomach and the other clasping her shoulder. Her hands rose to grip his wrists. He dropped his head to rest it against hers, the scent of her hair on every ragged breath he drew.

He didn't know how long they stood like that, sharing the heat of their skin. His arousal had shifted gear, urgency giving way to a tenderness that threatened to undo him. If this was what a simple embrace reduced him to, he had no idea how he was going to survive making love to her.

"I love you," he said, voice low and aching, "I love you, I love you so much." Her grip on him tightened. He wanted to fall on his knees before her, he wanted to pull the moon from the sky and give it to her on a silver chain. He couldn't believe he'd gone without her for twelve days.

"Tell me what you want," he whispered in her ear.

She tugged at his wrists to loosen his hold on her and turned around to face him, still caught in his arms. She tilted her head up and said, "Kiss me."

He did as she asked. The lace of her brassiere scraped against his chest as he pulled her up against him with one hand, burying the other in her hair. Lips met and then tongues, slow at first, then with rising intensity. She took control of the kiss, turning them and forcing him back and back again until his legs met the bed.

She broke their kiss and pushed at his chest. He took the hint and sprawled back on the mattress. Once he'd gotten far enough onto it, she climbed on top of him, straddling him as she reached behind her back to unhook her bra.

He watched reverently as she revealed herself to him, then gazed up at her eyes, reading her playfulness and affection, her trust and her desire. She lay a delicate hand against his face, rubbing her thumb along his cheekbone.

Her eyelids lowered as she surveyed him. "You're mine," she said, and smiled when he hardened further beneath her.

He raised a hand to her breast and caressed her, eyes riveted to catch her every flicker of response. "All yours," he agreed, "always." And she was his as well, even if she wasn't ready for either of them to say it yet. All his life he'd detested authority in every form. But power was something different. It could be taken - with a gun, a linoleum knife, a plausible threat - or it could be exchanged, a smile for a joke, a shoulder for a tear, a heart for a heart. This was the dance he and Teresa had been doing from the beginning. He'd accepted her lead because she was willing to following his in turn. And over the years that waltz of theirs had traveled further than either of them would have imagined. Now, he would gladly follow her into hell itself. But he suspected that night's destination would be far more pleasant.

He circled her nipple with a finger, lips parting as he watched it tighten. "So what do you want to do with me?"

Her eyes darkened.

"Everything," she said.


	3. Chapter 3

Part 3:

The first thing Teresa saw when she woke up in the morning was Patrick Jane smiling at her from the other side of the bed, all tousled golden curls and tanned skin with a fine dusting of stubble, and it made a feeling rise in her that was disturbingly close to adoration. She immediately closed her eyes again to try to make it go away. It didn't work as well as she'd hoped.

She had not, she admitted to herself, been adequately prepared for sex with this man. She'd imagined it a lot of different ways - rough and desperate, agonizingly slow, even, these past weeks, tender and romantic. She'd imagined _him_ different ways too - clinically reading and manipulating her reactions, stricken with guilt, drunk and uninhibited. But she'd gotten it all wrong.

Of course, that was hardly surprising. She had not, until last night, actually _believed_ in sex like that. When some woman in a cheesy novel talked about sex as a transcendent experience, or a joining of souls, or that kind of garbage, she'd assumed it was either pure fantasy or a euphemism for "he made me come really hard."

She was forced to concede that she may have been mistaken. Jane had not done anything particularly different from what other partners had done with her in the past, though the level of finesse, attentiveness, and timing he brought to it had elevated the simplest acts to something remarkable. Still, it had not been notably athletic, long-lasting, or exotic. But it had felt like the whole world disappeared and there was only the two of them fused together in a bubble of heat and pleasure and - goddamn it - wonder and joy. It felt like he'd reached all the way into her heart and left indelible finger prints that she'd never be rid of until the day she died.

It hadn't bothered her at the time. She'd been drunk on his body and the magic of his hands on her, and it hadn't occurred to her that anything that felt that good could be wrong. But now it was the morning and she still felt like a layer of skin had been stripped off of her, like if she opened her eyes and saw him again she would melt into a puddle of goo. She was a cop. She'd been taking care of herself since she was twelve years old. She was not _gooey._ She was not the kind of woman who made nauseating heart-eyes and thought her boyfriend was _dreamy._

And despite all that, there was a not-inconsiderable part of her that wanted to roll on top of him and do it all again. Another part thought it might be a better idea to bolt from the room and never come back.

She decided on seeking coffee as a compromise. She made it out of bed and into the bathroom without having to look at him, which seemed like a small victory. The woman in the mirror facing her bore no outward marks of what had happened, but she thought there might be a worrying new softness in her eyes and around the mouth.

She realized she still reeked of them, and decided on a shower. Sense memory was powerful, after all. Maybe when she smelled like her hair products and not sex, she'd feel more like herself.

But once she'd dressed and made it to the kitchen, there he was, fixing her a cup of coffee, and the sight of him made her weak all over again. She accepted her mug from him and sat down at the table, eager for a little distance. He joined her with his tea. She sneaked a glance at him, and then another.

"You look the same," she said accusingly. "Was last night not -" she cut herself off, unable to finish the question in a way that didn't make her want to cringe in shame. But he was the one who'd claimed to be hopelessly in love with her. Shouldn't what they shared have changed something for him too?

He had the gall to laugh at her, though the smile on his face was mostly happy and only partly amused. "Never fear, darling, you rocked my world just as much as I rocked yours."

Her only reply was a suspicious glance.

"It's just - the way I suspect you're feeling now, I've been feeling that for a while already."

"Since when?"

"Since I realized I was in love with you."

She remained skeptical. "Then why didn't I notice it?"

"Well, I was trying to hide it from you because I hadn't decided whether it would be right to pursue you. But you probably did notice some things, you just didn't know what they meant."

She thought back. It was true that when he first started acting differently, she'd thought it was about him coming out of his post-Red John funk, rather than anything to do with her. And since he'd declared his feelings for her, he _had_ given her some awfully mushy looks. But still… "So last night didn't change anything for you?"

"Of course it did. If you recall, I was the one of us who cried."

He'd shed maybe two tears, and it had, oddly enough, seemed like an appropriate reaction at the time.

"But," he continued more hesitantly, fiddling with the string on his ring finger, "I suppose I was more prepared, because I've had that kind of experience before."

They looked away from each other, both awkwardly aware of the question this had immediately prompted for her: whether the sex had been better with his wife. Lisbon knew that it was an unfair question to begin with, even more so because they'd only tried it once - well, twice if you wanted to get technical - while he and Angela had had years to figure out how to please each other. She felt ashamed for comparing herself to a ghost at all, and more ashamed for how fiercely she wanted to come out on top.

She hadn't felt this ridiculously needy yesterday. Something was definitely wrong with her. She felt as wobbly as a peeled egg. She stared resolutely at her mug and sipped her coffee, because if she couldn't stop her thoughts from going haywire, she could at least keep them behind her teeth.

For all the good that did when the other person in the room was Patrick Jane. She could feel his eyes on her, and the tension in the air ratcheted up another notch. She had to fix this. There was nothing he could possibly say that would make her feel better, so she had to stop him from saying anything at all.

"What do you want to do today?" she asked, still not looking at him. Having the day off work was on the one hand a relief because she didn't have to attempt to act professionally or deal with the rest of the team while she felt she had "I Slept with My Consultant" stamped across her forehead. But on the other hand it meant she was stuck with him and all the feelings sloshing around in her without the ability to send him off to interview witnesses when she needed a break. She suspected that if she kicked him out of the apartment it might hurt his feelings. And she had the even worse suspicion that if she did it anyway, as soon as he was gone she'd immediately want him back again.

She was clearly losing her mind.

"It might be nice to get outside," he said. "We could have a picnic in the park." He paused for a moment. "Or we could just spend the day in bed." Another pause. "What do you want?"

She hated it when he asked her that. She wanted to be back in control of herself. She wanted him to put his arms around her and never let go. She wanted to know how she was supposed to survive this, and whether he felt like he'd been turned inside out too, and if this was a permanent condition or if there was some chance that tomorrow or next week she'd wake up feeling like a fully separate, self-contained person again rather than a component of this strange lurching amalgam that was _them._ She thought of all the people she'd interviewed who referred to their spouses smugly as their "other half." She didn't _want_ Jane to be her other half. She didn't want to be a half at all.

She remembered then that he'd barely been out of doors in the past two weeks, and decided that if she was a lost cause, they may as well do him some good. "The park sounds nice," she said.

"Excellent," he said with false cheer, and got up to start on breakfast while she finished her coffee.

He left her mainly to her own devices for the morning, and she set to work cleaning the apartment, doing laundry and clearing the spoiled food out of the fridge and taking care of the other chores that had gone by the wayside during the two weeks of nonstop work that had gone into catching Nurse Edward.

Jane busied himself with some inscrutable task on the laptop the FBI had issued to him. When she asked him what he was doing, he just told her she'd find out in due time. She decided to let it go.

When she was down to scrubbing out the inside of the microwave, he announced it was time for their outing.

He started by driving them to pick up supplies. In the car, it was impossible to avoid looking at him, and her tension level started rising again. He glanced back at her and smiled when he felt her gaze, and she felt a blush warming her cheeks, which was just unacceptable. She could not possibly have turned into one of those women who salivated every time Jane sent a cheeky grin their way. At this point, being unaffected by his charms had practically become the basis of her whole career. So, fine, she was human, occasionally his good looks and charisma got to her a little, but she'd never let it sway her. But now just seeing his profile as he focused on the road was doing something funny to her chest. It turned out that rather than building up an immunity, all this time she'd just been incubating the worst case of him anyone had ever come down with.

He pulled into the parking lot of the kind of grocery store where everything was organic and cost three times as much as it should, and she decided to wait in the car rather than go in and bicker with him over the price of crackers.

She leaned her seat back and closed her eyes, trying to get a grip. To at least understand what was happening to her. She remembered Jane's voice from the breakfast table: _"I've been feeling that for a while already… Since I realized I was in love with you."_ She'd blocked out the implication at the time, but she had to admit there might be something to it.

Was she in love with him? She tested the concept out gingerly, rolling it around in her mind. It… well, it certainly didn't feel _not_ true. It wasn't a bad thing, she told herself a little desperately. Would it be so awful, being in love with her - her boyfriend? Well, it was kind of awful so far, but also kind of… aside from the terror and confusion and general feeling of having been thrown out of an airplane, it felt _good._ It had felt very, very good last night, before reality began to set in again. It felt good when she saw his face, or heard his voice, or - well, she hadn't let him touch her yet today, but she already knew how good _that_ was.

She'd suspected that she was _capable_ of loving him. She would never have accepted his advances otherwise - she wouldn't have toyed with him that way. But she hadn't known it would be like this. Like a dam had burst inside her and now these feelings kept tumbling her around and pulling her under, and he was the only person in the world who could keep her from drowning. But what if he chose not to?

Jane returned before she'd resolved anything in her mind. Instead of a grocery bag, he was carrying a wicker hamper large enough to comfortably house a corgi. "Look what I found!" he said happily as he stowed it in the back seat. "Now we'll be set whenever we want to go on a picnic - it even has its own plates and cutlery!"

"I'm sure it was a real bargain."

He clicked his tongue at her lack of enthusiasm and began to discourse on the traditional food-carrying apparatuses of east Asia as he drove them to William Land Park.

Once they'd parked, they decided to go for a walk before eating. They started on a loop around the ponds. After a couple of minutes, he reached out and took her hand, lacing their fingers together. When she failed to pull away, he began to rub his thumb across the back of her hand. It felt unfairly good, like he was conjuring up new nerve endings just by touching her. Then his other fingertips started making little circles too and it was almost overwhelming. This could not possibly be appropriate in public, she thought, glancing around to see if there were children watching.

"Will you tell me what's bothering you?" he asked softly.

"Why do you think something's bothering me?" she asked, playing for time, her voice going high against her will.

"Because I'm not an idiot," he said, "and because you've barely been able to look at me all day."

She pulled her hand away from him and crossed her arms, staring resolutely at the ducks paddling through the murky water. "I just - I don't understand how none of this bothers _you,_ " she said a bit petulantly, looking at him at last but unable to hold his gaze. "You're just so - so calm and well-balanced and sure about all this -" she gestured between the two of them, "and it feels like you've strapped me into a roller coaster and you're just waving at me from the sidelines while the bottom drops out from under me."

He laughed at her, then grabbed her hand again and pulled her over to a bench, ignoring her scowl. "So you're telling me," he said, "that you would feel better if I was more of a basket case? And because I'm not, you think I don't feel as strongly as you do?"

It sounded kind of terrible when he put it like that. "…I guess."

He laughed again. "Then have I got some good news for you! I've just been trying to act like I'm holding it together because I thought if you found out what a lunatic I really am about you, you'd run away from me and never look back."

"Really?" she asked hopefully.

"Would you like to know just how unbalanced I actually am?" he asked, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear.

She nodded, feeling herself melt beneath his touch.

He took a breath. "When I was undercover, one of the things I decided was that if you die, I'll just kill myself immediately. There's no point going through a whole drawn-out grief-stricken breakdown again. Not when I know I'd never be able to recover a second time. Better to just save myself the suffering and cut right to the chase."

"That's _terrible,_ " she said, and took his other hand. On some level she knew that this was an upsetting piece of news that she had deep objections to, but she was stuck on how the man who turned her into mush had just said he couldn't live without her while gazing into her eyes with soulful intensity.

"Yesterday morning, when I noticed the string you tied on me," he continued, "it made me want to get out of the shower, track you down, ravish you immediately, and then go buy a ring to put on your finger."

"It did?"

"It did."

She sighed and leaned her head against his shoulder, picturing it. Jane in the shower with ravishment on his mind was a very attractive picture indeed. Maybe all his unruffled steadiness had been an act after all. Maybe underneath it, he was still the same obsessive maniac who'd wormed his way into her heart.

"You really _are_ a basket case."

"Teresa," he said seriously, "I don't think you ever need to worry about being the unhinged one in this relationship."

She laughed. "That's a relief."

"Do you feel better now?"

"I do, actually." She straightened up and punched him in the shoulder, but not too hard. "I don't want you to kill yourself."

"I know," he said easily. "And I don't want you to die. So as long as you can avoid that, neither of us has a problem."

She decided to shelve that argument for another day. Or at least until after lunch. "So what did you get us to eat?" she asked.

"Let's go find out," he said, and pulled her up off the bench to go back to the car to retrieve the basket.

As they walked, he wrapped an arm around her waist, and she let him tug her closer. "I promise you're not in any of this alone," he told her, dropping a kiss onto her head. "I'm right here with you."

His grip on her tightened, and when she glanced up at his face, she saw wistful tenderness mingled with something raw and almost wild. "When we made love last night," he said, "I felt like I was reborn, like your hands on me, your body around me were changing every molecule in me and if I could have, I would have stopped time and just stayed right there with you in that moment for a thousand years, with no more sadness or loneliness or murderers to catch. But then I thought that if that happened, I'd be shortchanging us, because you and I are just getting started, and I wouldn't want to miss out on learning everything about you I haven't yet, or on knowing what our five hundredth time together is going to be like, or seeing how you change over the years to come." He took a breath. "For over a decade, my greatest wish was that I could go back and undo my past mistakes. But last night I realized that isn't true anymore. The things I want most are in the future now. And that was when I cried. Because after everything, you've brought me back to life again."

Her throat was too choked to get words out, so she just put her hand over the one he had on her hip and squeezed, probably too hard.

Maybe it wasn't so bad, she thought, jumping out of an airplane, if someone else was there too, falling with you.

x-x-x

After they finished their picnic, Patrick lay his head on Teresa's lap and closed his eyes, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the way she was running through her fingers slowly through his hair, like she was doing it for her own pleasure as much as his. He tried to lull himself into total relaxation, but a kernel of worry would not dislodge itself from his mind. He was still off his game. He'd seen her skittishness in the aftermath of their intimacy and thought he could reassure her with normalcy and self-possession, but it had been the wrong play. And when she explained the problem, he'd thrown himself blindly in the other direction instead without thinking through the consequences. In the short term, while her own emotions were in upheaval and she felt uncertain and over-exposed, confessing how unreasonable he was about her had soothed her, as it had been meant to. But she would still remember his words next week and next month. And when she'd regained her equilibrium, he would still be the same damaged, possessive man he was now, and that might no longer seem so charming.

He saw, then, that he hadn't been keeping his more socially unacceptable impulses from her for her sake so much as to protect himself. Self-obfuscation was a deeply ingrained habit, and though to some extent he meant to shed it, he wasn't sure how comfortable he was baring himself to her completely. And yet every time he did, she surprised him, drawing closer when he anticipated she might back away. She was his weakness and his strength, she maddened him and kept him sane, and he fully expected she would continue to confound him for the rest of his life.

Her fingers left his hair, and he was about to protest when he felt them skim across his cheek. She traced his forehead, the line of his nose, his jaw, his eyebrows, then skated over his eyelids, whisper soft. All thought evaporated from his mind, and he was helpless to do anything but feel her. A single fingertip mapped the outline of his lips and he felt himself begin to harden at the exquisite delicacy of her touch.

Then her hand stilled and he felt her muscles tense beneath his head. He opened his eyes to see what had upset her and followed her gaze to a bicycle police pedaling past them on a patrol of the park.

"Is that -" she asked.

"Officer Lopez? Yes," he said, disgruntled by the rude interruption of the outside world. Lopez had been the first to the scene of a murder they'd investigated two years ago.

"Do you think he recognized us?"

Jane sat up and squinted at her. "No. But would it have been so awful if he had? We aren't doing anything wrong." The anxious dread on her face stabbed at him. "You were never this secretive when you dated in the past," he stated neutrally.

"This is different!"

"Because it's me?"

"Yes."

He recoiled from the look on her face. In his vanity, he'd foolishly imagined that her insistence on keeping their relationship private had an entirely different motivation - he knew she wasn't comfortable airing strong emotions in the office, and had thought it was the intensity of their feelings that made her uncomfortable with the prospect of their coworkers finding out about them. But he'd clearly been very wrong, and that in turn made him panic about what else he might have misinterpreted.

Then her expression changed from embarrassed to remorseful as she saw his response.

"No - not that," she said urgently. "I'm not - I'm not ashamed of being with you. It's just - it's complicated."

"So explain it," he demanded.

She blew out a frustrated breath and plucked at the grass beside their blanket. "Look - you know how much gossip there already is about us. It paints me as - as… unprofessional."

That was, he knew, the least of it, but he didn't see why she should let it control their lives.

"So if it gets around that we're actually together," she continued, "it's only going to get uglier. And then there's the fact that you're _you,_ and half the women in the field office and a decent number of the men wish they were the one sleeping with you, so the news will travel like wildfire, and they'll all have their claws out for the person who got what they wanted. So yes, there are complications with you that there wouldn't be if you weren't on my team, or if you were a bit less flashy."

He wasn't sure he liked being called _flashy,_ but that wasn't actually the most distressing part of what she'd said. "What do you mean, _if_ it gets around? Just how long do you think we can keep this a secret?"

There was that guilty look again. "I just thought… why go through all that until we're sure this is going to work out." She looked down. "I can cope with what they say if we're together. But if we break up - having to hear other people's opinions about it at the water cooler would just make everything that much worse."

She was, he told himself, not being unreasonable. They hadn't been together long yet, and no matter how many times he told her he wouldn't leave her again, there was a part of her that wasn't going to believe it just from hearing the words. But it couldn't hurt to say it again. "In case it wasn't abundantly clear from what I said before lunch, I'm already sure about this. There isn't an _if_ for me." He took a breath. "But I take your point. If I were you, I might wait and see if buyer's remorse set in too." Her frown line appeared and he flashed her a smile before she could interrupt. "So we'll do it your way for now. But I have a condition."

"What's that?"

"Our relationship needs to be public knowledge before you make any career moves. As acting agents, fraternization rules don't apply to us, but if you join up with the Feds for real or go anywhere else, I want us grandfathered into any contract you sign. It'll be much easier to negotiate any necessary exemptions before you're government property again."

"That's… surprisingly reasonable," she admitted.

"I have my moments," he said lightly. "So do we have a deal?"

She held out her hand, and he shook it, then bent over her hand, kissing it and then kissing all the way up her arm until he got to her sleeve. He put a hand behind her head then and leaned her back onto the blanket. "Officer Lopez is long gone," he assured her, and lowered his mouth to hers.

She pushed him off of her a few minutes later, her cheeks pink and lips shiny and swollen. He rolled onto his back, tearing his eyes away from her to get himself back under control. "You know the team's going to figure us out," he told her conversationally.

"You think?" she asked skeptically.

He allowed himself an eyeroll. "The only reason they haven't already is because we spent most of this case separated. They do know us."

"Well." He could practically hear her marshaling herself. "We can trust them."

He didn't like the uncertainty in her voice, but the guilt was even worse. "You don't have to feel badly about wanting to keep this to ourselves," he told her. He didn't want anything about being with him to hurt her, or make her doubt herself. She was already giving him so much more than he'd expected. He just couldn't help being greedy with her - the more of her he had, the more he desired. But even if _everything immediately_ was what his heart clamored for, it wasn't fair to demand it. Patience was the least of what he owed her.

She sat back up and looked down at him, then away, her gaze skittering nervously. "It isn't…" she licked her lips and drew a shallow breath. "It isn't because I don't love you."

Her words were barely loud enough to hear, but he didn't miss them. He scrambled to sit up, dumbfounded. "It isn't?" he asked disbelievingly.

She shook her head, chin tilted down and hair hiding her face. He needed to see her. He put a gentle finger under her chin and lifted it up. Her eyes were glossy, and he read defiance and fear and pain but no doubt in them.

She batted his hand away and looked at the duck pond past his shoulder. "A long time ago," she said, "I told you that I thought you would choose life in the end, and you told me I was wrong. That I couldn't fix you. I kept trying, obviously. I kept hoping. There were moments - but the closer we got to him, the more clear it became. While you were in Vegas… I realized I'd lost. You'd chosen death after all, and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't even blame you - you'd been honest with me about your intentions from the start. So I just… mourned you. Then you came back, but it was obviously temporary. I tried to just be glad for whatever time there was before the end. When you left me on the beach on the way to unmask Red John, I knew that it wasn't just because you didn't want me interfering in his death. You didn't want me to interfere with yours, either. But then you - you changed your mind. I didn't believe it. Not when you said it - not even when he was lying there dead and you were still standing next to me. I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop. I think… I think part of me still is. I don't know how to stop."

He wanted to reach out to her, so he did. He pulled her against his chest and rested his forehead on her shoulder. "Oh, darling," he whispered, overcome. It had been easier for him, for years and years, to downplay her feelings for him, and consequently the degree to which he'd hurt her. No wonder she'd bottled it up for so long, and felt so swept away when their physical intimacy had unleashed the flood.

"I'm sorry I put you through so much for so long," he told her. "I'm sorry I trained you to always expect the worst with me." He pressed a kiss to the side of her neck, then pulled back to look her in the eye. "But it wasn't like that, for me. Before Vegas… I was getting desperate exactly because I didn't want death anymore. I don't think I was fully aware of it, but I wanted to really live again, and I didn't want to wait another five or ten years to do it. Escalating the game with Red John was the only way I knew to get to the end. Those six months I was away… I missed you so much. Every day. But I needed to find him, and I needed to keep him away from you. I - I know I wasn't making good decisions for a while there. But it wasn't for the reason you think."

She gave him that happy-sad smile.

"I don't blame you for needing time," he said. "Honestly I'm amazed you're here with me at all."

She shrugged and met his eyes, and what he saw in hers made his heart ring like a bell.

"It was never a choice," she said, a little rueful. "With you, the dice were loaded from the start."

He grinned. "Well, I could hardly leave something as important as you to chance." He kissed her. "I love you far too much for fair play."

Her nose wrinkled. "I can't believe I fell in love with a cheater."

His pulse accelerated outrageously every time she said that word. "You'd be bored by anything else," he murmured, leaning in to brush her cheek with his nose. "Admit it, I've ruined you for honest men."

Her laughter was the best thing he'd ever heard. "And who have I ruined you for?" she asked.

"Everyone," he told her.

She smiled at that, uncomplicated happiness on her face, and he saw that he'd finally gotten something right. He felt a rush of pride, and he thought that if he could make her look that way often enough, he might be worth something again.

x-x-x

Teresa found herself reflecting on those honest men Jane felt he'd stolen her away from. It was late afternoon and she lay half on top of him, both of them naked and drowsing. Her senses were replete with him - the scent of his sweat, the taste of him still bitter in the back of her mouth, the sound of his heart beneath her head, the lulling comfort of the lazy patterns his fingers traced on her side. She thought he was wrong, though. She'd been ruined for honest men long before she met him - it was just now she'd finally admitted it.

Greg had been honest, as had her handful of semi-serious boyfriends since. Those were the men she tried hardest to want, to make things work with. But it never did. And she'd known all along that she was the problem, not them.

She hadn't exactly been good, as a kid, but she hadn't been bad either. She'd had a wild streak - her mother called her a little hoyden, she remembered. She'd bossed her brothers around mercilessly and fought any kid at school who tried to give them trouble. But she'd believed in the basic justice of the universe - that good behavior would be rewarded and bad punished - until after her mother's death. Or until what it did to her father. Then she learned that the bad things happened whether you deserved them or not, and following the rules in an upside-down world only made things worse.

So she stopped doing it. She couldn't count the number of times she forged her father's signature - on checks for the monthly bills, on absence excuses, on report cards. She cheated gullible kids out of their lunch money. On a couple of occasions she'd stolen what she couldn't buy. And she'd lied her head off - to her teachers, her brothers, and most of all to their father. She never liked it, but she said what she had to, and she didn't regret it.

It changed her, though. So when she got to know an honest man, and tried to get close, there was a gulf of misapprehension. And she found herself lying yet again, pretending to be the same kind of person he was, the kind who didn't know just what they'd be willing to do when push came to shove. The kind who thought doing what was right and following the rules were the same thing.

Jane had been a relief, really. He was the only person she knew who acted on the outside how she so often felt on the inside. And, better yet, he got away with it. With quite a bit of help from her, of course, but it was (usually) well worth the bureaucratic headaches to get to watch him say what she couldn't. So they acted out the pantomime where she chastised him for breaking the rules and he made some token amends, and they both pretended not to know she'd enjoyed the whole business as much as he had. Right up until he crossed a line and it was actual people getting hurt, not just some bigwig's self-image, and she found herself furious both at him and at herself for not having stopped him.

His hand drifted from her side down to her hip. "What are you thinking?" he asked.

"Thinking about you," she said, a hint of teasing in her voice.

"What about me?"

"Mmm," she said. "In college I took a course on the psychology of criminal behavior, and the professor had this quotation from some Roman guy he repeated a lot. It went, 'nothing human is alien to me.' He said it meant -"

"That anyone is capable of anything."

"Yeah. He said that under the right circumstances, we might do the same thing as any criminal we encountered, so we shouldn't indulge in us versus them thinking, pretending that perps are different from everyone else."

"And what does this have to do with me?" Jane asked.

She found herself tracing circles on his chest. She still wasn't used to the expanses of his skin - it was impossible to stop touching it. "I've tried to keep that sentiment in mind, but it doesn't always work for me. There are things people do - not just criminals but also other cops, or these honest, decent men you keep saying I might have ended up with if not for you - that try as I might, I just can't wrap my head around. But not you. You've done things I disagreed with - things I hated even - but you've never done anything I felt I couldn't understand."

He hummed an acknowledgment. "For me, I think it's not so much about understanding - it's that you feel more _real_ than other people. A lot of people just strike me as - thin, simple, insubstantial. Whereas you're always vivid, layered… interesting."

"Well, it's nice to know I don't bore you," she said.

"Ha." He gave her a gentle pinch. "It comes down to empathy, doesn't it? We all have more for some people than others. It's funny, when you have too little empathy, you get a sociopath, but when you have too much, you get a different type of psychopathy - like Nurse Edward."

"You think his problem is too much empathy?" she asked skeptically.

"Sure - people do terrible things because of empathy. Because it means that other people's pain hurts us. So in moderation, empathy motivates the best in us - our efforts to help one another. But when it's too strong, and we don't know how to make the other person's pain stop, we lash out to punish them for making us suffer alongside them. Edward couldn't fix his friend's pain, and it made him so furious he killed everyone who reminded him of the guy."

"He didn't seem angry. He claimed he was helping them."

"Meh. No one _really_ thinks murder is helpful. That's just what he tells himself so he can reconcile his violent rage with his belief that he's a good person. But it all stems from how much other people's pain hurts him. Too much empathy."

They lapsed into silence. She shifted and rubbed her foot along the inside of his calf, enjoying the slight rasp of his coarse hair on her sensitive sole.

Then another bit of their earlier conversation returned to her and she pushed herself up on her elbow to look at his face. "What were the other things you decided while you were undercover?"

"Pardon?"

She narrowed her eyes at this show of ignorance. "In the park," she reminded him, "you said _one_ of the things you decided in there was…" her face scrunched in distaste, "what you'd do if I died. What were the other things?"

"Ah." His expression went blank and then thoughtful, which she understood meant he was deciding what to tell her. After a moment he sat up in bed, leaning against the headboard. He glanced at her and then away. His fingers tapped out a rhythm on his knee through the sheet, and she thought he was wishing he had some sort of distraction for both of them - a steering wheel in his hands, a coin to pull from her ear, a cup of tea to hide behind. But there were the just the two of them naked in bed, and she felt a twinge of guilt for asking him to expose himself even further.

Then he turned a bright lie of a smile toward her and began to talk. "Going undercover did bring back memories of my other time on a ward like that. It was… not easy, but it did clarify some things for me. For a long time I tried not to think about that period of my life. Having it come back - it felt both very immediate and very far away. Like looking at the moon through a telescope." He paused for a moment. "In the early days you knew me, I used to tell myself these two contradictory things. First, that I'd been weak to fall apart that way, and if there'd been more to me I would have just picked myself up and gotten to work seeking my vengeance instead of letting the trail go cold while I wallowed in a drugged stupor. The second was that I'd failed my family by surviving them at all."

"What the hallucination of your wife said," she murmured.

His head jerked in a sharp nod. "On some level I knew all along that my desire for revenge was purely for my own benefit - that it wouldn't make any difference to them. So if my only reason for living was selfish, then wasn't that worse than no reason at all? I was caught in this conundrum of simultaneously having contempt for myself for both not being able to live and not being able to die. But - looking back now from a distance - I could see that I was actually just having a - a normal reaction to an untenable situation. It was reasonable - justified even, under those circumstances, to have broken down and tried anything I could to escape what I felt. But at the same time I'm grateful that I got through it, both for my own sake and because my death wouldn't have done anyone any good. So I felt that I could finally forgive myself, both for trying to die and for not succeeding."

"I'm glad," Teresa said, her voice strange and dry in her throat, as if she hadn't used it for weeks. She wanted desperately to touch him, but the foot of space between them seemed to belong to him alone, and she didn't know what he wanted. Her heart felt like it had left her body and wrapped around him like a pair of wings, encompassing everything he was, every twinge of his own pieced-together soul. She wanted to be his home and his shelter, the place where he could lay down his many burdens.

"So those were the things I decided," he continued. "That it was all right that I'd wanted to die back then, but it was good that I hadn't. That I'm glad to be here now, and I don't have to feel guilty for that either. But that if - that if it ever comes down to it, I won't make myself outlive you. I know you don't like hearing that, but it makes me less afraid of loving you."

It was true that she didn't like that last part. But she did understand it. And, with that sensation of plummeting through the sky again, she understood something about herself as well, something she had dimly sensed but refused to see, because the scope of what she felt for him had been terrifying. It still was. But it was also a gift she could offer him, one that might matter at a time when he was working to forgive himself.

So she reached out and cupped his face in her hands, gently turning him so he could see her eyes. Her heart was skittering in her chest like she was about to pull a cord that might either open her parachute or detonate a bomb. She swallowed and forced herself to meet his gaze. "I know you've done things in the past that you're not proud of," she said. "And you know that I don't like some of the things you've done either. But I need you to know that I love you. I love all of you. Not apart from the things you've done or in spite of them, but including them. I love every version of you there's ever been, because they're all part of who you are now. I love Patrick Jane the Boy Wonder, and the fake psychic, and the suicidal mess, and the man who lived for revenge. And I will still love you after you make your next mistake, and the one after that. I don't mean - I can't promise that nothing you might do could come between us. But if it did, it wouldn't be because I stopped loving you. Because I don't think that's possible."

His eyes burned into hers. "Teresa -" his voice broke on her name. Then his mouth was on hers, at once gentle and demanding. Their eyes remained open, locked together as their tongues met, and it felt devastatingly intimate, like he was seeing all the way into her most private heart. Without breaking their kiss he shoved the sheet down and lowered them to the mattress, his body covering hers, though he kept his weight on his arm so as not to crush her. She slid her hands down his back, urging him closer.

His mouth left hers and he was kissing her eyelids, her cheeks, her jaw, her neck. "You're my miracle," he murmured into her skin. "You're -" he made a sound of frustration and nipped her earlobe. "There aren't enough words for how I feel. But you're everything to me. I love you so much I can't breathe sometimes."

She smiled, his fervor soothing her. She buried a hand in his hair as he reached between her legs and caressed her. Desire and tenderness burned together within her, and her breath caught in her throat. They were still hurtling through the sky together, but she thought they might never hit the ground. And maybe the word for that wasn't falling after all. Maybe it was more like flying.

x-x-x

Patrick's body was sore in unfamiliar ways. He wasn't sure his legs would hold him up if he tried to get out of their bed. Fortunately, there was no need to. Teresa had drifted off after their post-shower detour back between the sheets, and he was more than content to remain exactly where he was, watching the orange glow of sunset play across her skin.

He wanted to spend the rest of his life looking at her. He knew he'd been remiss, as a lover, in not telling her how beautiful he found her. He had a thousand ways to compliment a woman, but now the words stuck on his tongue. He never wanted her to think that he'd love her an iota less if she had warts and crooked teeth and all her glorious hair fell out. She had a beautiful face, but he didn't adore it for its aesthetic qualities but because it was _hers._ He couldn't look at her and see a collection of features to be dispassionately assessed. He could only see _her_ eyes, _her_ nose, their effect blindingly, incomparably powerful because they evoked whole rooms full of memories of her, smiling and frowning, irritated, impatient, tolerantly amused, her looking back at him and seeing him as no one else could.

Besides, he mistrusted beauty. It was a trap, a sham, a shiny fishing lure. Not that he was immune to it - he was a man, after all. A lovely face might draw him in, but he knew better than to forget the hook hiding beneath the surface. After all, he'd cast it out himself more times than he could count - he'd traded on his looks all his life and was well aware of both their power and their essential emptiness. It was a paradox: beauty was inherently dishonest, yet Teresa was both honest and beautiful. And he didn't know how to express that in a way she would understand.

He reached out and gently traced the line of her cheek, careful not to wake her, feeling that something within him was crumbling, and the only thing that could hold him together was her nearness.

How she humbled him. Hours later, he was still awestruck by her words of love. At every turn, without even meaning to, she taught him lessons in courage and strength of heart. Just that morning she'd been terrified of her own feelings, but instead of pushing them - and him - away, she'd not only accepted them, but shared them with him. It was a form of grace he could barely comprehend. He had been raised in a frankly transactional world. No one got something for nothing, and only a fool didn't negotiate the price before making a deal. That outlook had been so deeply ingrained in him that he couldn't escape it even when he tried.

When he'd understood his feelings for Teresa, he yearned to win her love, to earn her affection. As if she was a prize at a fair. As if all he had to do was perfect his sales pitch and upgrade a few of his features to fool her into settling for less than she was worth.

But what she'd said to him today - even he knew there was no way to earn something like that, or deserve it. He could only receive it, gratefully, reverently, and do his utmost not to give her any further reason to regret what she'd bestowed on him. And, of course, love her back, to the best of his grasping and selfish ability.

He had spent so long being ashamed of himself. Of the choices he'd made. But what she'd told him had given him a glimpse of wholeness, of being more than an assemblage of regrets bound together by bloody-mindedness and the light of Teresa Lisbon. He tried, painfully, glancingly, to imagine a version of himself in the future who might be able to live with his past as peaceably as she claimed to.

It occurred to him that the worst things he did were tied to the worst things he believed about himself. He wondered if believing something else instead might result in different outcomes. Then he filed the thought away for future consideration. Today was a good day. He didn't want to waste it on maybes and might-have-beens. He didn't want to be anywhere but right where he was, with this woman, his at last to touch and hold and love until his body and his heart both ached with it.

She let out a huff of breath and he watched her expression change as consciousness returned to her. An eyelid cracked open and then closed again.

"You were watching me sleep, weren't you," she said, blinking at him, her voice thick from sleep. "Do you do that a lot? No, wait, don't answer. I don't think I want to know."

As soon as her eyes were on him, the crumbling feeling came back. He plastered it over with a wolfish smile. "Like you never gaze at me when I'm napping on my couch."

"I do not _gaze,_ " she said, rolling over and taking a sip from the glass of water on her nightstand. "I check on you. Because you require nearly constant supervision."

"That and you think I'm pretty."

"I think you're pretty aggravating," she muttered, sitting up.

"Well, I think you're pretty."

She glanced at him suspiciously, her cheeks an enchanting pink.

"I'm not ashamed of how much I like looking at you," he told her, giving her a wink. "Which is an awful lot."

Her blush deepened, spreading from her face all the way down to her chest. He watched its progression with appreciative interest.

"Stop it!" she said.

"Stop what?"

She got up and pulled on a tank top and shorts, then tossed some clothes at him and sat back down at the foot of the bed. "Trying to make me uncomfortable in order to hide from me."

He pulled the shirt over his head. "What exactly do you think I'm hiding?" he demanded.

She scowled at him. "Whatever it is you're actually feeling right now. You have this haunted look in your eyes but you just smile and tease me and think I won't notice. Well, I didn't call you on it when you were just my consultant, but things are different now."

She said it as a challenge, but there was a bit of a question in her voice too. She wanted to find out exactly how different things actually were.

But he didn't know what to tell her. "I don't know what I'm feeling," he said, letting the smile fall off his face.

She crawled over to him and ran a hand through his hair, then cupped his cheek and looked into his eyes. "What is it?"

"What you said earlier," he began, the words spilling out of him from he didn't know where, as if she'd hypnotized him, "I don't - I don't - I don't understand how you can feel that way. About me. You _know_ me. You know me better than anyone ever has. You know what I've done, what I've wanted to do, what I'm capable of. So how can you…" He trailed off, unable to even say it.

"We were just talking about this," she said gently. "You're capable of anything, same as me, same as anyone. But I think you're referring to things you haven't even done. Things you _chose_ not to do."

He shook his head. "Your religion says that intention to commit a sin is a sin itself. And believe me, I had more than intentions. I had plans. I had preparations. I had - I could have done it. I could have done more - more than I think you know."

He looked back at her and found something completely unexpected in her face.

"And you think that makes you different from me?" she asked.

He just blinked at her in confusion. "You never…"

"Planned to murder someone? But I did," she said. "Why do you think I never turned away from you when you told me what you wanted to do?"

Her hand dropped from his face, and he grabbed it. "What happened?" he asked.

She took a deep breath. "My father had a handgun," she said. "He taught me and my brothers to shoot when we were old enough. It was for protection. I never thought twice about it. Until one day… He was drunk, but he'd fallen asleep before things got out of control. But the boys were screwing around, playing hockey on the hardwood floors, and Tommy broke a window. Dad woke up, he saw the glass on the floor, and he just… He went nuts. He was screaming that he'd lost everything else and now we were destroying the house too, we were destroying him - he said a lot of things. And then he got the gun. He pointed it at Tommy. I got between them and I managed to talk him down, I got him to come to the kitchen and have another beer and when he put the gun down I picked it up and stuck it in a drawer out of sight. The safety was off. When he was teaching us - he always said you never, never aimed a gun at anything you weren't prepared to shoot. I don't think he'd really meant to fire but - the state he was in, anything could have happened. That night, I lay in bed trying to figure out what to do. I couldn't let him - Tommy was just a kid. They were all just kids. But Dad was getting worse, and he had a gun. So after a few hours, when everyone else was asleep, I went downstairs and got it from the drawer. I disassembled it and threw the pieces away, far from the house. And then I went home again. He didn't remember what had happened. A few weeks later he went looking for the gun and couldn't find it. I told him that he'd sold it to a friend and he believed me. But he said he was going to buy another. And so I had to think about what to do if he did. And I did think about it. Not just about how to stop him if he was threatening my brothers. About how to stop him from threatening them in the first place. I thought about how to make it look like an accident. If it came to that. It didn't, though. He took care of it for me six months later. Right after he got around to buying that new gun."

She smiled at him, as bitter as he'd ever seen her. "So you so see, I'm no better than you. I never have been. You wanted to kill a murderer who destroyed your family and many others. I obsessed about killing a man who'd never taken a life, someone I'd loved."

By the time she finished talking, she was rigid with tension. He was certain she'd never told that story before. He was honored that she trusted him with it, but he couldn't agree with her conclusion. He put his hand on her arm and rubbed gently up and down, trying to convey that he was there for her in every possible sense. "Darling, I'm so sorry he put you through that. But you were a terrified kid trying to protect your little brothers. That you were willing to do whatever you had to - it just shows how brave and strong you were. That's not - that's not the same as fantasizing about torturing someone to death for your own pleasure. It doesn't make you like me."

She looked at him with unguarded eyes. "You said I know you better than anyone. How could I possibly do that if the same things weren't in both of us? If you won't admit that I'm like you, then maybe it's the other way around. Maybe you're more like me than you think. Neither of us went through with it, after all. I know you could have. You could have ditched us and gotten your revenge at the end there, and I - I don't think I would have stopped you."

He shrugged. "Just arrested me after, right? You always promised that."

She shook her head. "If I'd been there when you killed Timothy Carter, I'd have put the handcuffs on you myself. But by the end? It was too dangerous. Red John could easily have left orders for someone to kill you in custody if you were arrested for his death. The Blake Association was everywhere. I would have done whatever it took to protect you."

He took this in. She was truly a marvel. "I don't deserve you," he said.

"Why not?" she demanded. "What exactly do you think makes you so unlovable? That you have regrets? Who doesn't? That a monster once used your arrogance as a pretext for killing your family? That wasn't your fault. You're just a person. There's good and bad in you, like in me, like in all of us. But you're _my_ person. You're the one who knows _me_ better than anyone. And I'm not giving that up."

"I don't want you to," he said, pulling her into a hug. She was warm and soft and strong and she smelled like his personal heaven. "I never want you give up on me. I couldn't stand it if you did."

She shifted against him and nudged his nose with her own. It was a gesture of such loving familiarity that his chest ached with stunned gratitude. He rested his forehead against hers and breathed through it.

"All right then," she said, her fingers twining through the curls at the back of his neck. "It's a deal. I won't give up on you and you won't run away from me."

He let out a ragged laugh. "At this point I don't think you could pry me off with a crowbar," he told her.

"Well, I'm afraid you're going to have to let go long enough for one of us to make dinner, because I for one have worked up quite an appetite this afternoon."

"Can't do it," he said, pulling her more firmly against him with one arm while he grabbed her phone off her nightstand with the other. "Order a pizza."

"Fine," she said, "but we're not eating in bed."

They ate on the couch. He kept one hand on her leg while he fed himself with the other. She gave him an amused look but tolerated the contact without complaint. He knew he was being ridiculous, but for whatever reason he needed the physical connection, and as long as she was willing to put up with it he saw no reason to deny himself.

She put a boringly predictable medical drama on the TV, which he tuned out almost completely. Once they were done eating, he tucked her under his arm and relaxed, playing with her hair while she was distracted by the show.

It struck him that at some point along the way, he'd set Lisbon up in his head as his personal moral arbiter - the judge and jury who would review the evidence of his existence and sentence him accordingly. In addition to his feelings for her and his need for the CBI's resources, this had also made it imperative that he remain in her good graces: if she'd cast him out, it would have meant there was no hope left for him. Accordingly, it had given him a kind of pleasure and reassurance every time she yelled at him - no matter how angry she was, as long as she was still trying to get through to him, then whatever he'd done, he hadn't crossed the final line.

And he supposed that when he'd set out to win her heart, he'd really been asking, on top of everything else, for her verdict on him: whether he could be forgiven for his failings and deemed fit to participate fully in human society, or if he was irredeemably flawed, condemned to eke out an existence on the periphery of other people's lives. Or perhaps she would assign him some penance by which he could atone for his misdeeds and salvage himself from the junk-heap of loneliness.

But she had returned none of the judgments he'd been prepared for. She had, instead… accepted him, fully, flaws and misdeeds and all. It seemed - well, improbable, inadvisable, and possibly insane. But she had meant it. And he found he didn't quite know how to come to terms with that. The dissonance between her view of him and his view of himself seemed irreconcilable, yet he couldn't dismiss hers as wrong. Not without betraying the respect and admiration and trust that had led him to appoint her as the adjudicator of his fate in the first place.

Her unbounded love ought to be a balm to his soul, but what he felt in that moment was more like… fear.

There had, he remembered, been a few times, in those last, worst days undercover, when he'd really felt like he'd lost her, and on top of the anguish and loneliness and loss, there had also been a little bit of relief.

"Ouch!" Teresa yelped, stiffening beside him.

He realized that he'd wound a strand of her hair so tightly around his finger that he'd hurt her, as well as cutting off his own circulation. "Sorry, sorry, here, let me -" he extricated himself from her, careful to inflict no further pain.

Free, she scooted out of his grasp and tucked her knees up under her, rubbing the tender spot on her scalp. She clicked the TV off and frowned at the look on his face. "What's going on with you?" she asked.

He shrugged uncomfortably and hunched over a bit, hiding from her gaze. "Thinking."

"About what?"

She was worried about him. Again. Of course. And he had nothing to say that would ease her mind. "It, ah, occurred to me that…" he flicked a quick glance at her. "Do you remember when we were in Monterey and I said that thing about how easily you could destroy me?"

"Sure." Now her hand was on his leg.

"Well, I think there's an ugly little part of me that… wanted you to," he admitted slowly, head in his hands. "That wanted you to reject me when I asked you to let me love you. To - to excoriate me and send me away. Because then I wouldn't have to try to finish putting myself back together. I wouldn't have to be afraid of failing, or of anything really, because the worst would have already happened. I've been so terrified for so long of what my next big mistake might cost. And if I had you - if I had what I wanted most, then there would be so much more to lose."

She squeezed his leg. "Are you saying that if I'd turned you down, you would have just… what, curled up in a ball and given up on life?"

He gave her a pained laugh. "Of course not. I would have immediately begun scheming to change your mind and win you over. But that sick piece of me would have felt very vindicated and would keep telling me I should just leave you alone if you were smart enough to finally figure out you'd be better off without me."

"But… you do know I wouldn't be better off without you, right?"

He shrugged again. "I don't know," he admitted. "I think, sometimes, about the life you might have had if you'd never met me. You'd have gone a lot further in your career - maybe not at the CBI, given how corrupt it turned out to be, but no doubt the Feds would have poached you if you hadn't been tainted by your association with me. You might be married, have a family of your own if you wanted it. But I took all that away from you."

She whacked him on the shoulder and he flinched, looking up in surprise. "You're an idiot!" She whacked him again for good measure. "A condescending idiot! First of all, how stupid do you think I am? You think I don't know what choices I'm making? That I lost all agency the day you joined my team? You think I couldn't have gotten rid of you if I'd cared that much about a promotion? You think if I'd decided I wanted to settle down and have babies, you moping around on my couch would have stopped me? Believe me, I have not been weeping into my coffee mug as I counted down my fertile years all this time. It's my life, Jane. I knew perfectly well what I was doing with it. And second, I already know what my life would have been like without you, because that's how I spent the majority of it, before we met. And it wasn't better. It was just lonelier."

He raised his hands in defeat. "I stand corrected," he said, smiling ruefully at her. "I don't think you're incapable of making choices. I didn't mean that. I just - choosing to stick by me all this time seems like such a dubious one that sometimes I feel like I must have tricked you into it."

She hit him again, but gently. "You do realize that my choices aren't the problem here. That voice in your head is."

He nodded. "Yeah."

"So what helps you stop listening to it?"

He swallowed. "Touching you helps," he confessed.

She nodded and stood up from the couch, then grabbed his hand and towed him to their bedroom. She sat him down on the edge of the bed and stood between his legs as she began to unbutton his shirt.

He caught her wrist. "I'm not sure I can…" he said, trying not to blush.

"This isn't about sex," she told him, and got back to work.

She stripped both of them to their underwear and pulled back the covers. He climbed in obediently, and she arranged herself fully on top of him, chest to chest, her face tucked into his neck. He raised his hands to her back and stroked her slowly, letting himself relax into their cocoon of warmth.

She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, holding him tightly. "You know something?" she whispered to him. "I like who I am best when I'm around you. I wouldn't have wanted to miss out on this version of me."

He blinked, his eyes suddenly damp. "The version of me I am around you is the only one I like at all," he said.

He felt her smile against his skin. "Then it's a good thing you're around me almost all the time, isn't it?"

"Yeah," he said, voice thick. "It's really lucky."

"Do you feel afraid right now?" she asked.

"No." With her so close, it was impossible to feel anything but good. Safe. Loved. God, he didn't think he'd ever felt so loved before in his life.

"Me neither," she said.

"That's good." He stroked her skin and wondered what would happen when she finally realized exactly how much power she held over him. Probably nothing. Probably she wouldn't take any advantage of it unless she was desperate to stop him from doing something really stupid. If she'd been even remotely calculating, she would have figured it out already. It wasn't as if he'd hidden it, lately. But still, he couldn't quite bring himself to spell it out for her.

So instead he said, "You should know that I'm never going to stop loving you. I'm yours for as long as you want me, and I'll still be yours after that too."

She squeezed him. "Well, you should know that I don't regret my choices. In fact," she added slowly, "I'm pretty proud of them. I'm glad I spent my time doing good work that meant something to me instead of playing politics to land a fancy title and an endless supply of bureaucratic nonsense. I'm glad I didn't settle for a mediocre relationship with a boring man who didn't really understand me."

When she explained it that way, it did seem much less like he was a millstone around her neck. And it was true that while she was a lot of things, conventional wasn't one of them. He didn't know why he'd imagined the conventional markers of success would have been what she was really after, or what would make her happy. He supposed it had been less a genuine belief than a convenient stick with which to beat himself. That, he realized, was another bad habit he'd have to try to break. It wasn't fair to make her battle his sense of inadequacy every damn day. Surely he could manage to offer her something better than that.

"If you're willing to save me from dying alone," he said, "I promise to save you from dying of boredom."

"It's a deal," she agreed without hesitation.

"Shake on it?"

"Oh, I think we can do better than that," she said, and levered herself up enough to kiss him properly.

As her tongue pushed into his mouth and her hair tumbled down around his face, blocking out everything but her, he thought that lately he'd made a few good choices too. He was determined to keep the streak going as long as he could. It wouldn't last forever, but given the reliability of her forbearance, maybe it didn't have to. Maybe, if he was lucky and she was game, his best would be good enough. Maybe, finally, he could be enough.


End file.
